Transcriber's Note:

Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has been preserved.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For a complete list, please see the [end of this document].

A link to the Appendix which contains the German Constitution has been added for the reader's benefit.

THE NEW GERMANY

BY

GEORGE YOUNG

Author of "Portugal Old and Young"; "Nationalism and War in
the Balkans"; "Le Corps de Droit Ottoman," etc.

NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE
1920

Printed in Great Britain

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

The following account of events in Germany during the period from the Armistice to the Treaty of Versailles was written mostly in the summer of 1919. But the events of the succeeding period from the signature of the Treaty to its ratification during the autumn and winter call for no alteration and but little addition to the text. The six months hereinafter described from February to August were a—perhaps the—critical period for Germany and for Europe. It was the formative and creative stage for New Germany and for New Europe. If the whole phase through which Central Europe passed after the collapse of the Central Powers is considered as the genesis of a new age, then the week of actual revolution was a phase of intense heat and fierce energy, in which the old political organisms were boiled down to their most simple and essential types and in which the germs of new political institutions appeared in primitive forms such as the Councils. Thereafter came the period under review, in which the old and new types fought for a survival of the fittest; and the old—aided by the general cooling off of the revolution—to some extent reasserted their supremacy. Indeed during this last winter I have even occasionally thought that the types of old Germany might succeed in suppressing the new, thereby making it necessary to change the title and tone of this book. But I know this impression is largely due to the pessimistic and perverted point of view towards all events in Central Europe affected by the British Press with few exceptions. For our "Dailies" Germany is only a subject for "scare heads" and "stories," in which adventurous special correspondents see the Kaiser emerging from the Netherlands to re-ravage Europe like the Brontosaurus out of the Nyassa swamp. Whereas the reality seems to be that reaction has moderated as the revolution became more amenable, and that a "modus vivendi" between the two is now more of a possibility than it was.

It now seems less probable than it did last summer that the solution in Germany will be a "second revolution" as in Russia. Weak as it is politically, the present German governmental system seems too strong police-ically to be overthrown by force. The situation to-day in Germany rather suggests that in Great Britain two years hence than that in Russia two years ago.

The new Germany of this winter of 1919-20 is essentially, then, the same as that of last summer. It is not the old Germany of the autumn of 1914, nor the young Germany of the autumn of 1917. But it has developed rapidly in some respects in the course of this winter. Thus the rough and ready rule by Frei-Corps expeditions and garrisons has been supplemented by a gendarmerie (Sicherheitswehr); and the middle-class militia (Bürgerwehr) has been replaced by an organisation of armed special constables (Einwohnerwehr).

The effect and perhaps the object of this change is to obscure the class character of the conflict between reaction and revolution—between property and the proletariat. The police is no longer a weapon for use by a possible militarist reaction or monarchist restoration, and in return it will be supported by the moderate revolutionaries.

Reaction and revolution are reuniting as reconstruction; and this tendency appears in all regions of political activity. Thus the revolutionary Council system now seems established as a secondary representative institution supplementary to Parliament.

This development is, however, not due to maturity of political experience—as it would be in similar conditions in an Anglo-Saxon community—but merely to mortal weakness. German political vitality, owing to mediæval calamities, has always been low in modern times. Now, as a result of a four years' frenzy of war and a fifth year in a fever of revolution, German political vitality is a very flickering flame. So long as France and Great Britain continue to enforce the principles and procedures of the Treaty of Versailles and of the Paris Council, Germany will remain a danger to Europe—a danger, not because of its recent relapse into a Conservative reaction, nor even because of the decreasing risk of a Communist "second" revolution, but because Germany is an essential and vital member of our European body politic that is being kept in a morbid, even moribund, condition by the provisions of the peace. The Paris diplomatists have not yet learnt the lesson taught by a great French diplomatist two hundred years ago at the time of the last great European settlement but one. M. de Callières then wrote in his treatise on diplomacy—"We must think of the States of which Europe is composed as being joined ... in such a way that they may be regarded as members of one Republic, and that no considerable change can take place in any one of them without affecting the condition or disturbing the peace of all the others."

A majority of the rank and file of Greater Britain does so think of Germany to-day, but unless and until it can compel its rulers to act accordingly it will not get peace. Peace is only for men of good will.

Christmas, 1919.
65, Strand on the Green,
Chiswick.

CONTENTS

THE NEW GERMANY

THE NEW GERMANY

CHAPTER I

THE REVOLUTION

When, in January, 1919, I resigned my commission and made my way out to Berlin as correspondent for the Daily News, I had two purposes in view. One was to find out to what extent we had really won the war—in the only way it could be won—by forcing the German people into revolution; and incidentally to take any opportunity that might offer of furthering that revolution. My second purpose was to find out what prospects there were of making a more or less permanent peace—in the only way it could be made—by establishing the forces of reform in Germany; and incidentally to point out any openings favourable to the furthering of such a peace. The following book brings together and sums up conclusions communicated to the Daily News from time to time and is put forward as an answer to the double question: Have we won the war against Prussianism and have we made a permanent peace?

The answer to this question was only to be got in Berlin. The first mistake made by the soldiers and workers who had won the war was in not insisting on their representatives making peace with the German people and at Berlin. An experience of twenty years in diplomacy, beginning with the arbitration treaties of Lord Pauncefote and ending with those of Lord Bryce, followed by two years of war experience, beginning with political secret service and ending in the ranks, had convinced me from the first that true peace could only be got by developing the forces of democracy of the defeated peoples centering in Berlin, and not by any bickerings between diplomatic formulæ of the victorious Governments collected in Paris. That is why I preferred going as a journalist to Berlin rather than in any other capacity to Paris. And that is why the following papers are published. They show that anyone who spent the first six months of 1919 in Berlin and the big German towns would have seen easily enough how it was that, in spite of military occupations and religious thanksgivings and bonfires and bonuses all round, we were not winning the war but losing it: and how, in spite of territorial partitions and financial reparations, and signatures with gold pens and the setting-up of a League of Nations, we were not making peace but manufacturing wars. We have not yet won the war because we have not as yet supported in Germany the progressive—that is, the revolutionary—elements and suppressed the Prussian—that is, the reactionary—spirit: while we have, of late, been really losing the war by actually assisting German reaction against German revolution. And we are doing this just from the ignorance of our democracy and the insouciance of our diplomacy.

Our democracy has been prevented from ascertaining, and our diplomacy has been precluded from understanding what the German revolution really means, both to Germany and to Great Britain. Although we are slow to understand foreign movements, yet ignorance of such a movement as this would have been impossible but for the conditions under which the war closed. The German revolution, banned, boycotted, and blockaded, became to us a stone of offence, an odious ruin of the war, and so we failed to recognise it as the only possible foundation stone for peace.

The six months I spent in Germany were none too much to realise the radical and rapid changes going on; and I can see how difficult it has been for English readers to get an idea of what is really happening there from the little that has been written about it. They cannot do so at all unless they clear their minds of the cartoons and caricatures and clichés forced on them during the last five years by the propaganda and the Press. It is no use drawing Germany from the life for people who still have before their eyes the "Boches" and "Bolsheviks" of Punch and John Bull. One has, indeed, to clear away two strata of misrepresentation, that of our Government and Press and that of the German Government and Press; for the latter is as much opposed to the German revolution as the former.

It would have been better for Germany had it shown more courage and collapsed less completely last autumn. A few weeks' patient endurance under punishment in a losing fight would have gone far towards restoring it some measure of the sympathies of the civilised world. While the consequent occupation of the whole country would have brought us into direct contact with the German revolution, and would have prevented the fatal split between reformers and revolutionaries, between Majority and Independent Socialists. As it was, we English were left to draw such conclusions as we could from the reports of the few correspondents who penetrated to Berlin. But, with two exceptions, the English Press could at this time publish nothing about Germany that was not merely malevolent. And of the few Englishmen in Berlin as correspondents in January, almost all were replaced before the Treaty of Peace by foreign Jews who would supply the sort of propaganda poppycock with which public opinion is still being poisoned.

What people in England wanted to know was whether the German revolution was a real riddance of the evil we had been fighting and a real renascence of good that we could favour; whether it had gone far enough and deep enough to be a sincere repentance and a sufficient remediation. For, unless Germany was born again, it could not enter the community of nations, and until it did so, there could be no true peace.

They could guess that Kaiserism was dead and gone and Junkerism down and out. But even so picturesque and positive an event as the fall of Kaiserism had been only baldly mentioned in a bare telegram of a line or two. How could the British public realise that the Black Eagle of Prussia was no Phœnix and that the blaze of November 9 had left nothing of it but a bad odour and a white feather.

But in Berlin there could be no doubt. Kaiserism was dead—deader even than Tsarism—because the Kaiser was still alive. His shot-shattered and mob-swept palace was the only reminder of him. And every Berliner had more or less vivid recollections of his fall, recollections too lamentable, too ludicrous, to allow of any restoration of the Kaiser legend even now.

After reading your morning paper about revolution in Dublin and revolt in Glasgow and reconstruction in London, as you walk down to your office past the Dutch decorum of Kensington Palace, the Scotch skimpiness of St. James's, or the generous Germanosities of Buckingham Palace, does it ever occur to you to wonder what goes on in a palace when there is a revolution?

Well, this is what happened to the Kaiserschloss in Berlin on November 8.

The curious crowd that always collects outside the house of anyone mentioned in the papers, whether it's an absconded postmaster or an abdicated potentate, found that the sentries no longer challenged them, and first filtered, then flooded into the inner courts. Thereupon the police and guards left, and the palace remained in charge only of the Kastellan and a few servants and soldiers. All doors were kept locked, and beyond some shouting everything was orderly, for the prestige of the Imperial precincts still prevailed.

Then one Schwieringer, not otherwise distinguished, made his way to the Kastellan and got leave to address the crowd from a window. Having draped the balcony with a red cloth borrowed for the purpose, he declared the palace national property. This broke the spell somewhat. The rest of the soldiers left, and the crowd became noisy.

Late in the afternoon came Liebknecht, who engaged another balcony, borrowed more red curtains, made another speech, and after holding a sort of levée in the Throne Room left again. Later came soldiers and hoisted a red flag. So far the Kastellan had remained master of the situation, conducting his unwelcome visitors through the rooms, unlocking and locking behind him as on ordinary occasions with any ordinary tourists.

Then on November 10 came one Bujakowski, with a Slavonic eye for the possibilities of the situation. Having collected such soldiers and civilians as were hanging about, he made them a speech, and called on them to elect a council, and himself Commandant of the Castle, which they did. He then said he must have a suitable uniform. The council agreed, and appointed a delegation to make selections from the Imperial wardrobe.

Happy delegates—happy, happy Bujakowski! Five hundred uniforms and, say, five pieces to each. How many combinations does that give in which to find the perfect expression of a Spartacist commandant of a Hohenzollern castle. He did his best in the time no doubt. Delegate Schwartz, try a combination of those English and Hungarian uniforms! Delegate Schmidt, see if that hunting costume goes with a Turkish fez! History does not record the result, beyond a cavilling incrimination about a diamond-headed cane. But it must have been effective, for the Commandant returned from the Reichstag with his commission confirmed. The rest of the company played up to his spirited lead, and the next morning his "adjutant" attempted a coup d'état. Bujakowski suppressed it with a revolver, but was, however, deposed a day or two later by an ex-convict, who generously appointed him his secretary.

These three men then formed a triumvirate, which spent most of its time making excursions in fancy dress with the imperial cars, and, oddly enough, kept the castle in fairly good condition. It was not until the sailors' revolutionary corps turned them out that all order disappeared. Some ten commandants then succeeded each other rapidly. The seventh shot the sixth, and was knocked on the head by the eighth. The palace became a resort of bad characters, and was stripped bare. Eventually, it was retaken by force, and the sailors were ejected.

Berliners shake their heads over the loss, estimated in millions (of war marks). But I don't know that there is much to lament. Personally, I am grateful to Bujakowski. His burlesque buffoonery has exorcised the Imperial incubus that still brooded over the deserted shrine of departed littleness, and I forgive him for his share in destroying or dispersing some of the ugliest objets d'art in Europe.

Kaiserism died when William the Second fled to Amerongen and Bujakowski broke into his wardrobe. Nor has it been revived by the revulsion in favour of William of Hohenzollern that we have evoked by our proposal to put him on his trial in England. We have thereby rallied in his support many adherents of the monarchical principle who had previously abandoned him, and by persisting in making a martyr of him, by taking him out of this German pillory and by putting him on an international pedestal, we have already opened the door to a restoration of the Hohenzollern dynasty as a constitutional monarchy. This would mean a restoration of Junkerism and Prussianism, but not of Kaiserism. That peculiar blend of divine right and demagogy is gone for ever.

And what about Junkerism? That cannot be so shortly answered. Junkerism expresses itself in both regions of the ruling class to which Germany has been hitherto subjected—the civil and the military. It is the evil genius of both those great services; and seldom has the world produced public services with so much power for good in them and so much evil as in the German army and bureaucracy. And it is indisputable that the fate of Germany and the future of Europe now depend on whether the revolutionary spirit is strong enough to exorcise the evil genius of Prussianism and of Junkerism from the army and civil service. But the question as to how far, so far, Germany's good angel has fired its bad one out can only be answered as yet by a careful and impartial observation of events in Germany since the revolution. And if these events seem to suggest that the revolution has lost its impetus and that reaction has dominated it, let us remember that the results of a renascence of public conscience, such as occurred in the November revolutions, should be estimated by comparing the concrete conditions of to-day, not with the abstract principles then for a time extant, but with the concrete conditions existing before the upheaval.

As most have already got or can easily get a general knowledge of what general conditions in Germany were before the revolution of November and of what were the general principles promulgated by the revolution, much of what follows will consist of evidence as to how far the revolution has so far failed in realising those principles. For revolution has now resulted in a reaction in which every vantage point gained by the first revolutionary rush is counter-attacked and every early victory is contested again. As every consequent loss cannot be referred back to the deadlock before the offensive the general impression is that of failure. But the Prussianism that now fills German prisons with political suspects is rather a reflection of reaction abroad than a revival of the ancient régime.

By the first rush of revolution in November 1918, the military power of the officer caste was broken and the political power of land and money was reduced to insignificance. But there was no strong obstacle to their recovery, and the power of the bureaucracy was unimpaired. Though the instigators of the crimes of the old régime had been removed, the instruments remained; while the 'Independent' intellectuals, the public prosecutors of those crimes, were before long voted down. And yet before we refuse absolution to the new German democracy we must be quite sure that these relapses are real unregeneracy and not reactions caused by fear of Russian revolution on the one side or Allied retribution on the other. We can only judge of this by reviewing the revolution.

The history of the German revolution can be shortly described and sharply defined. After the first explosion on November 9 came a month of equilibrium between revolution and reaction. Then a month of which the first fortnight was a swing slowly to the right until the breach with the Independents on December 24, and a swing swiftly the second fortnight until the fighting with the Spartacists in January. Thereafter a month of rapid return to the point where it was before the explosion, a point reached with the formation of the Coalition Government by the National Assembly on February 13. Indeed the Government of Scheidemann only differed from that of Max von Baden in being one degree more to the left, a development which was due in any case apart from the revolution.

The German revolution is peculiar in having reached its highest point at once and in having then relapsed to where it started from without any positive reaction. This in itself suggests that it was due in its origin to external forces—propaganda from Russia on the one side and pressure from us on the other. Our military and naval pressure broke first the prestige then the power of Kaiserism and Militarism, while the Russian precedent gave the forces of rebellion and revolution a practical example how to express themselves in co-ordinated councils of workmen and soldiers—the Soviet system. We knocked German Kaiserism out of the saddle, and Russia gave German Socialism a leg up. And that's why it went so far so fast.

That's also why it never got anywhere. For it came to power before it developed its own personalities and policies, and it had, therefore, to put its trust in pre-revolutionary politicians. The Council system had no time to produce leaders—men with enough confidence in their own position and enough character to impose themselves on the permanent officials. The Central Council—the true revolutionary Executive—and the Congress of Councils—the true revolutionary Legislature—never got any power. It was all monopolised by the People's Commissioners, who were not really a revolutionary institution at all, but an ordinary Provisional Government of parliamentarians. And though they nominally held their mandate from the Congress of Councils a majority of them considered themselves as trustees for a Constituent Assembly. Such parliamentarians could work well enough with the permanent officials, and, indeed, welcomed their assistance. Whereas the councils, of course, came into violent collision with them.

Where the council system prevailed, as in the army, it made a real revolution, and broke the officer caste until the Frei-Corps replaced the conscript army. But the workmen were not so drastic in the civil service as were the soldiers in the cadres, and they allowed the parliamentarians to spare the Amalekite. Only the political heads of departments were replaced by Social Democrats; and, in one case I know, a revolutionary Minister allowed his predecessor, out of courtesy, to keep his official residence. This was, of course, all very nice, but it meant that the old machine was not broken up, nor even brought under control. The result was that a coalition between the mere reformers among the commissioners and the civil servants was enough to counter-balance the more revolutionary commissioners and the councils; until finally external circumstances determined the deadlock in favour of the former.

The German revolution never took its Bastille in the Wilhelmstrasse. The sentries set by the Soldiers' Councils at the doors of the Government offices, who loudly demanded your pass and only looked foolish if you ignored them, were symbolic of the failure of the German revolution. So insignificant were these sentinels of revolution that no one saw the significance when they were finally replaced by steel-helmeted Frei-Corps mercenaries last April. By the first week of December it had become evident that the course of events was leading away from the Congress of Councils to the Constituent Assembly, and away from social revolution to political reconstruction. The Central Council that should have been the driving-wheel of the Socialist engine was becoming no more than a drag shoe on the old State coach.

Before the German revolution was a month old—that is, by the end of the first week of December—it was entering its second phase, in which the Parliamentary Commissioners having ousted the proletarian councils from control, then divided among themselves into reformers and revolutionaries. And at the end of the second phase, early in January, we find that the reformers have ousted the revolutionaries.

This came about thus. The German Social Democratic Party was professedly revolutionary. Its political attitude had been traditionally one of refusal of all co-operation or even compromise with the imperial political system. On this negative basis it had been possible to combine in a common front comrades of very different points of view and of political thought. But this superficial solidarity could not stand the strain of the war. A sense of patriotism carried one section—the Majority Socialists—first into countenancing and then into supporting the Government; while pacifist sentiment against war in general, and this war in particular, carried the minority into more obstinate opposition. This finally split the party much as it split our Labour Party. The Majority Social-Democrats moved towards the Government, while the Government towards the end of the war came to meet them. Until finally the Ministry of Prince Max of Baden, that ended the war, not only represented the Reichstag majority, but also the Majority Social-Democrats.

When Prince Max went down in the revolution, he remitted the reins of government to Ebert and Scheidemann. They, knowing that alone they could not rule the whirlwind, called in the Minority Social-Democrats—the Independents, offering them equal representation in the Cabinet, then called the People's Commissaries, and in the Central Council. This arrangement was ratified by the Congress of Councils, though very perfunctorily, as it was considered only a provisional makeshift.

Now, while the Social-Democrats of the Majority were just parliamentary reformers, the Independents of the Minority, Haase and Kautsky, were revolutionaries. Liebknecht was a radical revolutionary who would not come into the Coalition. Consequently, whereas Ebert and Scheidemann considered themselves as merely Commissioners to prepare a Constituent Assembly, the Independents considered themselves Commissaries for the Congress of Councils. The former considered the revolution was probably unnecessary, and in any case had done its work in preparing the way for universal suffrage and a united Germany. The latter considered that the revolution had only begun, and could only do its work through the Soviet system and a general socialisation.

The first serious difference came over the Poles, with whom the Independents had practically concluded an arrangement which was, however, upset by Landsberg, a Jew from Posen, one of the People's Commissaries. Then came serious differences over German policy towards the Entente. The Independents were in favour of admitting culpability in the war crisis, Belgium, submarine warfare, etc., and of accepting such liability as might be shown to be equitable, while frankly discussing such assets as could be realised in payment. This the Majority rejected, preferring a negative policy of passive inaction. But the final breach came over internal policy and the use of force against the revolutionaries, the Communists, who were trying to force the revolution out of the rut of parliamentary reform into which it was slipping.

This Communist Left, commanded but not controlled by Liebknecht, was working for a second revolution in alliance with Russian agents. Its fighting faction, that called itself "Spartacus"—with the accent on the second syllable—was strong in the industrial districts of the centre and west, among the sailors in the coast towns, and in Berlin. Its ranks were filled rapidly with discontented workmen, disbanded soldiers, and "derailed" youths. Rifles were plentiful, and against such irregulars, supported by sailors, the Government was at first helpless. But as the regulars that had kept their ranks returned from the front it was found that some regiments were ready to act against the mob. Such a policy was denounced by the Independents, Haase and Kautsky, while Ebert, perhaps also Scheidemann, had doubts; but Landsberg, who had found a strong man in Noske, the Prussian War Minister, drove matters to a breach. On the first fighting with the sailors at the Marstall on December 23, Haase and Kautsky resigned. Thus the intellectual and idealist element of the revolution was removed from all influence over the conduct of affairs. The result was to cause in January a fight to a finish between the Real-politikers of the Government and the Radicals of the Opposition.

Police precautions against the Russian agents, combined with a Press propaganda against the Spartacists, provoked the latter to action. They seized the offices of the Vorwärts and other papers most offensive to them, and used them for publishing their own pamphlets. They had not apparently planned anything more than a demonstration, and did not anyhow exploit the success they had seized by surprise. The Government, however, after some difficulty in concentrating and supplying sufficient troops, converted the "putsch" into a pitched battle. Noske regulars with all the machinery of modern war, made short work of the half-hearted half-armed irregulars of Eichhorn, the Spartacist Police Commissioner. The revolution was crushed in Berlin and driven back to the coast ports, whence it came and whither it could later be pursued. Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, its Berlin leaders, were arrested and at once brutally murdered by their escort with the approval and assistance of the officers in charge. This murder, perfectly well known in Berlin at the time, was only proved by court-martial four months later, after which the culprits were allowed to escape abroad.

So the Independents having committed hari-kari and the Spartacists being hoist with their own petard, middle-class and moderate Germany heaved a sigh of relief, and hoped that the bogey of Bolshevism was buried. The elections to the National Assembly were held a few days later without disturbance, and the German revolution entered its third and last phase.

The German revolution which began in November—in old German the "Month of Fogs"—and ended in February—the "Month of Fools"—was fogged from the beginning and fooled to the end. Its third and last phase began about the middle of January with the establishing of provisional government by the moderate Majority Socialists, the crushing of Spartacus, and the elections. The radical opposition had tried to delay the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, partly because it was for the moment discredited by its secession from the Coalition and its connection with the Communists, and partly because it recognised that a reaction towards nationalism and conservatism had already been set up by the attitude of the Allies and would be given exaggerated expression at the polls. The drift of a weakened and wearied mass can raise a dictator to "save society"; only the driving power of a devoted and determined minority can realise a social revolution. But the Independents had missed their opportunity of seizing power and securing such foreign support for the revolution as they had earned by their attitude on the war. Their subsequent policy of obstruction had as little success as it deserved.

By the middle of February, when the new Government was proclaimed at Weimar, a communist revolution had been converted into a constitutionalist reconstruction; and that this corresponded with the desire of the majority of the people was shown by the election result. Every man and woman over twenty was entitled to vote, and a high percentage did so; while the system of proportional representation employed, whatever its defects, at least gave a fair numerical representation of the party presentments of public opinion. As in the English election, nationalism decided the issue in favour of the party in power. The Independent opposition was discredited by Bolshevism, the Conservative opposition by Kaiserism. Apart from the women the Social-Democrats would probably have had an independent majority; but, as was shown by the Pfalz results in which the women's voices were kept separate, they were more conservative and clerical than the men. As it was, the Majority Socialists with 163 out of 423 members were forced into alliance, not with the Independent Socialists who had only 22 votes, but with the Democratic Liberals who had 75. And as this relieved them of all responsibility to the revolution there was no reason why they should not further strengthen their parliamentary position by taking in the Clerical Centre with its 55 votes as well. And thus Germany got from losing the war a coalition as strong parliamentarily and as weak politically as that which winning the war gave to us.

While the revolution was being side-tracked in Parliament, it was being sandbagged in the Proletariat. A division of Frei-Corps with all the machinery of modern war, tanks, aeroplanes, etc., was sent against the north-western coast ports where the revolution had originated and where Spartacus was pursuing its policy of aggravating the food difficulty by preventing the sailing of food ships as arranged under the armistice. Bremen was entered by force, after fighting; and the other towns opened negotiations. On the eastern frontier a front was formed against the Poles, who had occupied nearly all Posen province, and fighting continued until the Allies stopped it. Great efforts were made to get together some sort of effective force as a basis for government; and the resultant Frei-Corps, though at this early date still few and inferior, were already enough to give check to the "Bolshevist" menace within and without the frontier. Meantime the whole "soviet" system of councils was practically 'frozen out' and politically 'snowed under.' The Central Council was got to abdicate in favour of the Constituent Assembly: the Socialisation Commission to which execution of the economic revolution had been referred, resigned re infecta: while the Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils were quietly ignored. A Provisional Constitution was published in which all ideas of a centralised Socialist republic were abandoned, and the federal Reich was restored with the substitution of presidents for princes. Finally the seat of the Assembly was transferred to Weimar, professedly to steep it in the sedative atmosphere of the old pre-Prussian "Kultur" of the philosophers and poets, and practically to withdraw it from the too stimulating atmosphere of Berlin, which was still an Independent stronghold. Even so might a demoralised and democratised England placate a victorious and Victorian America by transferring parliament to the Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon.

All these strong measures were really signs of weakness. Spartacus had to be put down to please the Allies, the Poles pushed back to please the nationalists, the Clericals bribed with Government posts to counteract French bids for their support in separatist intrigues. The constitution had to conciliate particularist sentiment in Prussia and the southern principalities because this sentiment prevailed in the general exhaustion of national and revolutionary forces. The old driving power of national sentiment, so much abused during the war and that might still have been called on for a desperate national defence, was worn out. The new energy of the revolution had been wasted; and the country, so far as its government was concerned, was back where it was when the revolution broke out, materially much the worse for its three months' excursion into revolution. In a word, the spirit of the new German Government was diplomatic not democratic. The revolution had come full circle and the Scheidemann Government of April might have been the Government of Max von Baden of six months before.

Morally, however, it was not the old Germany that had bowed before the "forty-seven Princes hats." It had brought back with it from the perilous peaks and bottomless abysses of revolution a wider outlook and a deeper insight. And if it returned from its adventure only more weary and wasted it had at least learned to lift up its eyes to the hills.

CHAPTER II[ToC]

THE REACTION

Just a quarter of a century ago I arrived in Weimar fresh from Eton, and as a budding diplomatist was invited to dinner by the Grand Duke. The ceremony was a credit to the Court of Pumpernickel. Exactly a week before there came caracoling to the door what might have been one of Napoleon's marshals, and was one of the Weimar army. For Weimar had then an army whose business it was to deliver invitations about a foot square.

Then on the evening itself and just half an hour before dinner, appeared a Court carriage and pair, in which you drove through the ancient Barbican of the Castle to a flourish of trumpets. Next came presentation to Serenissimus, a very big, very grand old gentleman, who was always urbanely inane except when he was inanely urbane. After that came presentation to the Grand Duchess, a very little, very grand old lady, who sat in a glass case. This was said to be on account of draughts, but she looked so fragile and precious that no maid could ever have been trusted with dusting her. The only time I ever saw her taken out of it was for a presentation of Orders of Merit to deserving domestics—an institution of her own which Royalty might adopt with advantage in these days when K.C.M.G.'s are commoner than kitchen maids.

And now arriving in Germany fresh from the Army, I was again invited to an evening party at the Schloss. But times have changed and the Schloss has been promoted from the seat of a Grand Duke of a mediatised and mediæval principality to the seat of government of a modern and middle-class German Republic.

The guard in the old Barbican no longer proclaimed my arrival on a trumpet, but presented a very business-like looking bayonet. Inside the Castle the State apartments were severely bare, as befits democratic simplicity. And instead of bland and blethering Serenissimus I was received by Scheidemann blandly, blandishingly serene. Instead of gold-laced grandees dining off gold plates I find a job lot of journalists bolting "belegte Brödchen"; and if there were fewer good things to be eaten there were many more to be heard. Everything struck me first as completely different and then as curiously the same as ever. Only the Dresden china Grand Duchess had no republican reincarnation.

And perhaps some day I shall find a still newer Weimar, the centre of a twentieth century Germany that will rise from the ashes of the nineteenth century and the dust of the eighteenth. Not the picturesque, poetic Weimar of the past, nor the practical, prosaic Weimar of the present, but a Weimar of wide vistas and broad views, in which Young Germany will learn to plan the future.

And as I dreamed of this new Weimar, walking back through the moonlit streets of the picturesque old town I was roused by the rumbling of field-guns on the march against the revolution. The drivers and gunners, hidden under their helmets and heavy cloaks, hunched on their saddles or huddled on the guns, were borne by slowly, silently, shapeless shifting shadows, passing out from the town where a few lights still shone, into the dark. The New Germany is not yet.

In the old days, when Weimar was only the German Stratford-on-Avon, the theatre was the centre of local society. The first thing you did on arrival was to present yourself and a box of cigars to the old gentleman in the box-office and get a seat for the season from which you could survey from a respectful distance the social lights on the stage and the serene luminaries in the Grand Ducal box.

But nowadays, when the stage of the Weimar Theatre has become the seat of Government, it is as hard to get a ticket for a session of the Assembly as it used to be for the Selamlik of Abdul Hamid. Incidentally, Germany is to-day much more like Turkey than its old, well-fed-up, well-fitted-out self. Dingy soldiers everywhere, dirt, decay and deprivation everywhere, listlessness and laissez-faire on the surface, with unrest and upheaval below.

But once inside the theatre things are not so different from the old days. The young ladies from the pensions can still "schwärmen" for the debonnaire premier Scheidemann or the distingué Brockdorff-Rantzau, or "schauern" at handsome Koenen, the saturnine Tribune of Halle, or at Merges, the hunchback tailor of Brunswick. But personally I find a Weimar "Full Session" about as entertaining and enlightening as was Weimar Grand Opera. A stout elderly gentleman advances to the centre of the stage and reads steadily and stolidly through a pile of typewritten recitative. The Independents, who go in for bravura and even gag a little, are now nearly always away on tour in the provinces. So the Assembly can continue daily from three to six digesting a pleasantly conservative Constitution and a pleasingly liberal lunch. For Weimar is an oasis of peace and plenty in a land swept by famine and fighting. Yet even the sleepy backwater of Thuringia has become a whirlpool of revolution, and Weimar was then ringed in by a region of revolutionary strikes that threatened it from three sides. One day a scouting party of Spartacists would be arrested at the station, on another the line to Berlin would be cut by a strike in some northern town.

The first week of the National Assembly was nominally occupied with such formal matters as appointing a President, voting the provisional constitution, pronouncements on foreign policy, and programmes of legislation. But naturally what most concerned everyone was the novel and fascinating business of Cabinet-making. The game was played with great spirit up to the finish, and the night before the final announcement had to be made the Cabinet was once more reconstructed.

It was hard on Germany that its first-born Cabinet should have been triplets, a trinity of the three co-eternal and co-equal parties—radical, neutral, and reactionary. But if the present political system was to be maintained and given a majority its Social-Democratic supporters had to be reinforced from the two parties next to the right, the Democrats and the Centre. For the Independent Socialists to the left were intransigent and in voting power insignificant.

So, after a long haggle between the party leaders as to the number and nature of the posts each party was to have, there followed another hard fight as to the persons each party should nominate for their posts.

It would have required a strong Government to reconstitute the German polity, reconstruct society, restore solvency, and revive economic vitality, especially after so much of the momentum of the revolution had been lost. And the men who had come to the top in the old Reichstag days were not such as to compensate for want of power in the machine. The new President, Ebert, the saddler of Heidelberg, had effaced himself during the storm of the revolution and has apparently been eliminated altogether by his new responsibility.

The Premier, Scheidemann, on the other hand, showed himself to be an able and active politician who could speak well on any subject and sing many songs without book. A clever man, but not the compelling personality to control the dynamic forces of Socialism or to coerce the static forces of Separatism.

His second in command in the difficult task of making a working Constitution was Preuss, the Minister of the Interior, a Jew, a jurist, and an adjuster. A man with great finesse, but little force. The questions of the constitutional future of Prussia, of the South German States, of the North-Western Republics, of the Rhine province, and of German-Austria, treated by adjustment along a line of least resistance, seemed likely to be interminable in their intricacies. Dr. Preuss, clever as he was, soon got into a terrible tangle trying to untie knots that would have been cut by the revolution.

The post third in importance, Foreign Affairs, a non-party appointment, was retained by Count Brockdorff-Rantzau—no longer "Dr. Rantzau"—since Counts, as he told the Assembly, can be democratic. He had both character and capacity, and if he achieved no success either at Weimar or Versailles he behaved with dignity under most distressing conditions.

Of the remaining Ministers Landsberg at Justice, a red Jew from the province of Posen, who was one of the Provisional Government and previously a People's Commissary, had a singular and somewhat sinister reputation. He was held responsible by those who knew for the policy of breaking with the Poles and with Spartacus.

Bauer at Labour was a trade union politician, a bourgeois turned bureaucrat. He is now Premier in the Government that signed the peace.

Noske at Home Defence (not "War," mark you, Germany has had enough of war), is the well-known Prussian Minister, the "Saviour of Society," the Bolsheviktonos.

Wissel at National Economy had a post with possibilities, but nothing so much became him in it as the leaving of it—when he found nothing could be done.

These were all Social-Democrats and constituted such driving force as that Government had. The inner Cabinet consisted of Landsberg, Noske, and Scheidemann—brain, backbone, and jaw. Heart it had none.

The new Government was, then, a Coalition between pre-revolution politicians, and its programme had to be a compromise between pre-revolution policies. It was only a Government to tide over a crisis and give the country time to recover itself. But it was at least composed of experienced parliamentarians who kept up appearances and did their best to reconstruct with pen and ink the State that Bismarck had wrought with blood and iron.

The debate that followed the announcement of the new Government showed clearly enough that the three parties of which the Government was composed, though they parliamentarily formed a bloc and socially represented the Burgerstand, yet politically had a different basis and a divergent bias. Red, white, and black make a very effective national colour, but whether red Socialism, a colourless Liberalism, and black Clericalism can make up an effective Cabinet seemed more than dubious.

Scheidemann, as Premier, opened the debate with a fighting speech for Social-Democracy. He threw the responsibility for the misfortunes abroad on the Right, the responsibility for misunderstandings at home on the Left, and proclaimed that the Government would work methodically at realising the results of the revolution.

He was followed for the Centrum by the venerable Gröber, who preached a sermon to the effect that all Power was from on High, that the revolution came very much from below, and consequently the only things left of any importance were State rights, rights of property, and the Church of Rome.

Thereafter came Dr. Naumann, for the Democrats, with an eloquent funeral oration, in which he buried the monarchy, wept over the lost colonies and provinces, and prayed that all of Germany that was left might live in unity.

Here we have the three points of view—the Radical reconstructionist, the Clerical reactionary, and the Liberal rhetorical—red, black, and white.

And the Government's programme presented the same parti-coloured patchwork. In foreign policy: an early peace on Wilsonian principles, restoration of the colonies and prisoners, equal participation in a League of Nations with mutual disarmament, compulsory arbitration and no secret diplomacy. In internal policy: democratic administration, ditto education and army, economic reconstruction, rationing, public control of monopolies, especially mines and power, right of association and wage boards, public health, rights for civil servants, agricultural development and settlement preferably on reclaimed land, taxation of war profits, income-tax, death duties graduated but not confiscatory, freedom of conscience, freedom of the Press, freedom of meeting—all sorts of freedom.

Obviously, there was nothing very red or revolutionary there, or rather the red was so cautiously peppered into the black and white that the net result was a colourless Liberalism. It was perhaps no less symbolic that the Assembly substituted the black, red and yellow of the Frankfort Liberalism of '48 as the new national colours. German Liberalism has always had a yellow streak in it.

The failure of Weimar is the failure of German Liberalism. German Liberalism always has failed Germany, and to this may be attributed the periodic catastrophes of Germany and the calamities they have brought upon Europe. German Liberalism fell an easy prey to French Imperialism in the Napoleonic epoch and to Prussian Imperialism in the Bismarckian epoch; and the one result of German Liberal movements has hitherto been to drive abroad the flower of the German "intelligentsia." The descendants of the "forty-niners" in England and America have been as valuable an element as were the Huguenots of France or the Flemings from the Netherlands, and they have joined heartily with us in overthrowing the despotism that exiled them. But if they had been a bit tougher and had fought their own fight out a half century ago they would have saved Europe and Germany the last five years. And the process is repeating itself. Weimar has failed, so far, more miserably than did Frankfort a half century ago. The failure of Frankfort was the failure of political inexperience—that of Weimar has been the failure of political impotence. Frankfort was over-confident in this power of popular idealism. It thought a revolution for right and reason could be made by righteousness and reasoning. Weimar was too cynical to think that the ideals of the November revolution could ever be a power at all in the Europe of the Paris Conference and of the Russian campaigns. Frankfort failed because its Liberalism was too young. Weimar is failing because its Liberalism is too old.

German Liberalism and its institution parliamentary party government failed in the first place because they could not come to power before their day was already past. In the second place they failed because when their ideals did get realised they did so without opposition and consequently on too theoretic lines. The German system of proportional representation for example is the most accurately and equitably representative of all electoral systems. But it did not provide the one thing Germany wanted, a powerful and popular Government, and it did a fatal injury to Germany by helping to split the Socialist party. Thirdly German Liberals failed because their leaders were men grown middle-aged and muddle-headed in hopeless opposition. They had consequently neither the energy nor the experience for popular leadership. And fourthly they failed because the peculiar combination of nationalism and internationalism that constitutes Liberalism was deprived of all prestige with the German people by the policy followed at Paris. This policy made it almost impossible for a German to hold any middle position between extreme nationalism and extreme internationalism. Weimar lost its best chance of acceptance when the German parliamentary State was excluded from the League of Nations.

And yet Weimar and German Liberalism had everything in its favour in the autumn of 1918. The reactionary factors that had so little difficulty in stultifying the Liberalism of Bethmann-Hollweg, von Kühlmann, and their predecessors were cancelled for the time being. Parliamentary government on the party system, the form of government developed by Liberalism on the English model, never having had a trial in Germany was accepted by nearly all political minds as the panacea. The minority of extremists who already advocated Council Government on the Russian model as the only political system that could realise the revolution had not as yet converted any large body of workmen. The Trades Unions held the workmen to the parliamentary system, and only some of the soldiers and most of the sailors were really revolutionary. The idea that the Soldiers' and Workmen's Councils could be anything more than a mere improvisation for destruction and could have any constructive, still more constitutional, function never entered the heads of any political thinker. Even Liebknecht joined the Coalition Provisional Government and only withdrew on second thoughts that were probably those of the much more far-sighted Rosa Luxemburg. The surrender of their authority by the Peoples' Commissaries to the Constituent Assembly in December was received without criticism, and the subsequent similar surrender by the Central Council passed almost without comment. Germany was to have the most liberal of constitutions and that was to be enough for the realisation of the German revolution and for the reconciliation of the enemies of Germany. It was only as the weeks and months passed and it became evident that German Liberalism, whether expressed in the diplomatic ideals or the democratic institutions of Weimar, was doing nothing either for the revolution or the reconciliation, that the German workmen began to pass over to the revolutionaries. Then, before very long, this political process expressed itself in local strikes and street fighting. The centre of political disturbance and development moved away from the theatre at Weimar to the streets of Berlin and of the industrial towns.

No doubt it was good policy in one way to transfer the Constituent Assembly to Weimar. An Assembly whose vitality is that of an elderly politician after a contested election and whose voice is that of a tired lawyer talking in his sleep, could not make itself heard, still less felt, against the violence, and volleyings of modern Berlin. Whether its work will be worth much must depend on how slow things move. They could easily move too fast for the pace of the Assembly. But at least as Dr. Preuss said to me of his Constitution—"it will not get in the way of anything better." One thing was certain, that the Assembly rested for its sanction, even for its survival, on the Government, not the Government on the Assembly.

And listening to a deputy in the Tribune reading a treatise on Constitutional niceties as to federation and free-state-rights, I think of the previous afternoon, when I was listening to a street orator in Halle shouting very nasty and unconstitutional tirades about food and freedom to an armed party of soldiers and workmen about to attack the Government troops. And then, again, I think of an afternoon in the Weimar Theatre a quarter of a century ago. A prominent member of the stock company of these days was an old horse blind of one eye—who was always led on with his blind side to the footlights. On this occasion he got turned round, and realised for the first time what a fool they'd made of him for years—and the rest was chaos and the curtain.

The Constituent Assembly has determined the Constitutional future of Germany, but the fate of Germany has not been decided there. The struggle between revolution and repression has not been fought out between the stalls and the stage of the Weimar Theatre, but in Berlin and the other big towns where the Government speaks with minenwerfer and machine-guns, and the Opposition obstruct with barricades. While the pressure of general strikes and local street fighting has won a constitutional recognition for socialising property and for sanctioning the council system never contemplated by the most revolutionary Parliamentarians, on the other hand class war has given reaction the support of the whole country against the working class.

The stagnant stodgy atmosphere of Weimar was very different from the starved and struggling air of Berlin. Though at first sight Berlin did not seem any more alive than Weimar. For Berlin to-day is a town of deserted temples and of dethroned gods. All along Unter den Linden—from the Temples of Mammon—the great hotels, to the Temple of Moloch—the imperial palace—everywhere is decay and dilapidation, an abomination of desolation in every façade and on every face. Mammon has indeed come off better than Moloch; for the palace and public buildings are shattered with shell and starred with shots and the balcony where the War-Lord appeared to his worshippers has a hole in the middle. Whereas the shrines of Mammon are full of worshippers from all quarters of the world. The hotel lobbies are crowded with vulture-like profiles brooding over the carcase of German economic enterprise.

Yet Berlin, though dirty and dilapidated, is by no means dead but the centre of the conflict between two faiths—two religions. For the revolution has ended the foreign war only to begin a civil war between nationalists and internationalists. On the one side, the Old Believers in the Orthodox Faith of nationalism, founded on wars of liberation, fomented by generations of political propaganda and excited to fanaticism by a war against the world. On the other side the new Dissenters of the revolution preaching internationalism and a Commune of Heaven in which only the poor shall have a place. In December internationalism was dominant in Berlin; nationalism was developing under pressures from Paris; while imperialism was dormant. For at this time in Paris the internationalism of Wilsonian principles was still counterbalancing imperialist and nationalist policies of the Allies. It was curious to note as the issues at Paris were decided one by one against internationalism how nationalism ousted internationalism from control of policy in Germany. By the time the Treaty of Versailles was published the old orthodox factor was again firmly established and the dissenters—the revolutionary internationalists—had been driven into the wilderness.

Any Sunday morning in Berlin during the sessions of the Paris Conference would probably have given more than one opportunity of observing the revival of the only real religion existing in modern capital cities—nationalism. On one Sunday I have in mind there were several protest meetings against the proposals reported from Paris for partitioning off German populations in the Saar district, West Prussia, Danzig, German Bohemia, and the Tyrol, and for preventing the union of German-Austria. For instance, you might have gone to the Sport-Palast with Erzberger in the pulpit. I myself did not. The rotund, rubicund, ebullient, emollient Erzberger, ex-Minister of Propaganda and delegate to Spa, who looks like Winston Churchill turned Papal Legate, was too ritualistic for me. I went to a "service" at the Circus Busch, where the sermon was broader.

Come with me then along Unter den Linden past the gilt crosses and cupolas of the Evangelical Dom and the shell-shattered sham classic façade of the Imperial Palace—deserted shrines of the faith—to a very dilapidated and dingy circus. There was a time when the Protestants of Germany were driven into the depths of the woods and the dens of wild beasts to hold their services. And to-day we find the pastors of protestant nationalism symbolically perched on pasteboard rocks amid woodland scenery, with a very realistic atmosphere of menagerie. The congregation is characteristically middle-class and by no means so formidable in appearance as the hungry, haggard workmen and their women that we should have found in a meeting of the dissenting internationalists.

As we come in Freiherr von Richthofen is perorating a sort of commination service, each verse of which is received with a loud response. The Paris Conference is worse than the Congress of Vienna (ah). France is outraging and robbing Germany when wounded and a prisoner (aah). But not a yard of German soil shall be surrendered without consent of its population (aaah). Germany can be dissected alive, but England will be disgraced and America dishonoured (aaah), and a time will come when such outrages will find their retribution (AAAH). A roar of applause which rouses the wild beasts in their dens, so that they roar in unison. The Paris diplomats have at last succeeded in stirring up again the weary wolves of war where they were lying licking their wounds.

But then, like a thin trickle of cold water into a boiling pot, comes the aged, anxious voice of the patriarchal Bernstein. He begins by reading the resolution of the Berne Conference; but we are here to attack the Paris Conference, and get restless, shouting "Zur Sache" (come to the point). He speaks of the fair-mindedness of the British delegates there, trade unionists as well as independents, and concludes that England as a people wishes to be fair to Germany; this can even be seen in developments at Paris. But we don't share this optimism—Blödsinn (bosh), is about the mildest of our interjections. Still Bernstein, nothing daunted, maintains that if Germans bring facts before the English the English will be fair. "Quite true," shouts an elderly man near by. "What do you know about it?" cries a youth some rows away. "I have been longer in England than you have in the world, Lausbub," retorts the man.

Bernstein again becomes audible, talking about Alsace-Lorraine. Once we might have appealed to foreign fairness there, too, he says, but now it is too late. Alsace-Lorraine is lost, and we lost it. This is too much for us, and we shout: "But you're speaking for partition. Quatsch! (bosh). Parteibulle! (party claptrap), etc." Bernstein dominates the storm enough to shout: "You have been so long fed on lies you can't swallow the truth." But we are not here to have truth shoved down our throats.

Eduard Bernstein withdraws—a prophet without honour, he has this week both left the opposition party and lost his Government post. He is followed by the representative of German-Austria, the new type of professor-politician, with a Victorian appearance and a Wilsonian address—very earnest and emphatic. The union of Germany and German-Austria is, he maintains, an internal affair and quite inevitable. We give Professor Hartmann a rousing reception, and file out into the cold, clear winter weather of Berlin.

Outside is a large black, red, and gold Republican flag, and a number of enthusiasts carrying placards, "No partitioning of Germany," "No peace of violence," and so forth. A long procession forms and moves off. Look at that group, mostly elderly men and women of the middle class, thin and threadbare with the look given by hardship and hunger that once in Germany one saw only in paintings of the Middle Ages—dull faces, but not without devotional fervour. So they shuffle along round a placard inscribed "Wilson's Fourteen Points," as their ancestors once shuffled in procession for Luther's theses. Unhappily Wilson did not succeed in nailing his theses to the portals of the Quai d'Orsay.

We reach the Wilhelmstrasse, where we join the processions from the other meetings. All learn with gratification that the Sport-Palast has hooted Erzberger because he won't declare for a restoration of Posen to Germany, and that the officers' meeting passed a resolution calling for the exclusion from the peace delegation of the internationalist Professor Schücking. The procession from the officers' meeting is headed by a band playing "Deutschland über alles," and by the old black, white, and red national flag, which is fast becoming the standard of reaction. After the Finance Minister, Schiffer, has welcomed our quite unobjectionable resolution from a balcony of the Reichskanzlei, a young officer suddenly appears in another balcony waving a black, white, and red flag, and adjuring us to swear loyalty to it. We are prepared to swear anything by now without much bothering what it is, and find ourselves being moved along towards the Tiergarten.

As we pass the British Embassy suddenly the officers' procession begins to shout and wave to a flabby-faced portly person bowing and smiling on the kerb. Ludendorff! By the undying jingo! Well! what next? Then to Bismarck's statue, where officers offer tributes of rhetoric and wreaths, and finally a schoolboy, climbing the pedestal, calls for cheers for the Kaiser, while a claque below start up "Heil Dir im Siegerkranz." But this is a bit too much for the bystanders. "Where's your Kaiser? Where's your Victory?" shouts one. "You give us the Kaiser," growls a soldier behind me, "and we'll give him a wreath all right—round his neck, and pulled tight."

The German dynasties exploited Luther and his Protestant movement. I doubt they will succeed in exploiting the national protestants of Germany, who are revolting against the infallible imbecilities of diplomacy. But undoubtedly our demagogues and diplomatists have succeeded in setting up again the idols our soldiers and sailors had overthrown.

The scene described above took place in March and then it was already becoming difficult to see the other side of Berlin political life—the internationalist and revolutionary. Reaction had begun to drive revolution underground and revolution was resisting spasmodically in eruptions and explosions. Let us take another day in March, one during the street fighting, to see what this other side of life in Berlin was like.

Before the war the life that filled the public places of Berlin was as vivid and vivacious as it was vulgar and vicious. Unter den Linden was like a scene in a second-rate revue; the company in one of the rococo restaurants was like the food, exuberant and cheap, but neither interesting nor choice. Nowhere were nouveaux riches so obviously new and so obtrusively rich. Everything was bright and loud, everyone looked overfed and over-dressed. Materially there was a sort of red-faced, raucous-voiced rotundity about Berlin. Morally it was in a decadence like that of the Second Empire at Paris when a charlatan despot and a cheap-jack Government were trying to dazzle the eyes and distract the ears of a half-deluded public.

But now, after four years' war, Berlin is like an Empire Exhibition that has been deserted and decaying through the storms of four winters. The stucco ornaments have fallen, the gilding is long gone, and the whole structure is rotting away.

Indeed, the first impression you get is that both city and people are dying of a decline. The people, like their houses, are dirty and dingy; everywhere crippled beggars and ruined or unroofed buildings show the direct effects of war. Clothes are threadbare, faces thin. Stalwart, straight-backed Americans, warmly clothed and well fed, stand out like solid shapes among shadows. As they stride through the streets you expect to see them pass through these grey, drifting figures as through ghosts.

Yet there is life still in Berlin, for men must be alive who can face death for a cause, whether it be for law or for liberty. But you must go further afield to find it than Unter den Linden where are haunting only ghosts of the past. We are hunting the genius of the future.

We shall be out all day on this hunt, and had better breakfast on bully beef and biscuit—a present from American friends—for black bread and substitutes are no foundation for a long walk; and of the vast transportation system of underground and overhead trains, electric trams, motor-buses, and taxis that used to carry over three million passengers daily, little indeed is now left. Moreover the wretched remains are to-day tied up by the general strike and street fighting. And so, avoiding the streets where sniping is in progress or barb-wire barricades threaten a search for arms and inspection for passes, we come to the General Assembly of Berlin Councils—that for the moment alone retains political control of the situation, since the Government took military command of it by the severest form of martial law and the general use of machine-guns.

Here we find a large music hall which before the war was a typical scene of flamboyant Berlin night-life. On this grey winter's morning it is crammed full of grimly earnest men—the delegates. On the stage is the Executive Council. The chairman the Independent, Richard Müller, is of the pastor or professor type—his colleague Däumig a heavily built, grey-haired man, might be an English engineer or merchant captain. On the left of the hall are the Communists, in the middle the Independents, and on the right the Social-Democrats, with a little knot of Democrats—the two latter parties supporters of the Government and opposers of the strike—but in a minority here. The business before the Assembly is the filling of the vacancies on the Executive Council left by the Communists who seceded from it when it declared the strike off, and the appointing of delegates to the National Congress of Councils which is to meet next month. But the Communists intend to force a discussion of the Government's policy as to the street fighting which is still going on at Lichtenberg, and the chairman has to concede this.

First come forward representatives of the Councils' Commissions delegated to investigate the stories of cruelties by the insurgents and to negotiate a cessation of hostilities between them and the government commanders. They give their reports in impartial and unimpassioned language, but indicate their impression that the military authorities they had to deal with were less concerned to restore order with as little loss of life and of time as possible, than to create the impression that the disorder was worse than it really was. They were exploiting a local "putsch" so as to carry out a general "pogrom."

The first speaker, Richard Müller, for the Independents, deplores the disorder, but denounces the Government for instructing its troops to shoot everyone found with arms, in reprisal for atrocities invented by its own secret service. The defence of the Government is undertaken by a Social-Democrat, who declares the Independents responsible for the disorders, amid stormy interruptions from the Communists. The chairman can hardly get him a hearing, and he leaves the stage, indignantly threatening that his party will secede unless it is better treated.

Next dashes on to the stage the Communist leader, who delivers an effective indictment of the Government's proceedings—at first interrupted by angry interjections from the Right. But as he develops the tragedy of what is going on outside, gives one name after another of comrades shot on no more than suspicion and describes the ring of howitzers firing into the crowded tenements of Lichtenberg, a silence falls over the meeting, and at last expressions of disapproval and dissociation come from supporters of the Government. For here is an Assembly that is alive enough, and though organised in parties, yet still open to the appeal of facts and to the force of arguments.

But suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, the speaker stops, leaps from the desk, and dashes off the stage at the back—while a confused uproar breaks out at the back of the hall, dominated by sharp military orders. The whole Assembly comes to its feet and faces about. The Left shout and shake fists at a row of steel-helmeted soldiers, with loaded rifles at the ready and a minatory machine-gun. The Right wave hands and shrug shoulders to assure the Left they are not accomplices. The platform proclaims that the proceedings will continue. A Democrat is put up to speak, but even his mind, conscious of right, and his courageous determination to express equal disapproval with the Left as to the entry of the troops are not enough to overcome the mesmerism of that machine-gun. The Assembly for the moment is reunited, but its vitality is gone.

We have been present at the first scene of the forcible suppression of the Councils movement in its constitutional centre—a suppression that has since become continuous.

The next covert we have to draw in our hunt is a club of intellectuals, mostly Independents, meeting weekly at a private house. Berlin never had a club life, and this is only an embryo of a political club before it emerges from a social gathering. The members sit round in a great ring, sometimes all joining in a general debate, sometimes breaking up into small discussions. They are of all types and tendencies. The well-bred, well-dressed man with a Balliol manner is a Rhodes Scholar and a successful diplomatist of ultra-radical views—for such an anomaly is possible under Count Brockdorff-Rantzau. The soldier in faded field grey describing a scheme for educating workman members of Councils in their duties, is a Communist. The diplomat is maintaining that Germany should join the League of Nations, even if it and the peace conditions are unsatisfactory. The worse the material position of Germany the better its moral position for taking the lead in a revision of the peace and of the League. The Communist brushes this aside as sophistry. How can you found internationalism on national Governments or even on national Parliaments? Wilsonism and Weimarism are both out of date and off the mark. An international Soviet of washerwomen would be of more real value and vitality. He is interrupted by cheers greeting the arrival of a famous fighting flying man, who was believed to have been one of the twelve hundred arrests of opposition leaders. An early Victorian middle-aged man in side whiskers and a frock coat, an ex-Minister in touch with the Government, begins to explain the necessity of reconstructing the Cabinet by eliminating the men most compromised by the loss of life, and including new men from the Left. He considers that while opinion is moving to the Left the Government is moving to the Right, and that as the breach widens the outbreaks will get worse. He fears, however, that men who have grown old in opposition and have only just tasted power will not be torn away from it and will find it simple to govern by machine-guns. But the young men are not interested in the Cabinet—they drift off into discussing their schemes for the Councils.

Here, too, is life—the life radiated by young men who feel that power is coming to them before youth has gone, the life reflected from middle-aged men who have broken the dull crust in which circumstance was encasing them.

When this club was suppressed shortly after, Berlin could ill afford the loss of vitality. For the absence of all healthy, happy and youthful faces made it like a world of gnomes and goblins. In the case of the men this was mainly owing to the war, and in the case of the women and children to the blockade. Over a million of the fittest men had been killed, and the result was a survival of all the unfit; while the food and fuel hardships had fallen heaviest on the women and children of the towns.

But there was another reason for the disappearance of all young men that had youth and manliness. Their warfare was not yet accomplished, and they had only come back from fighting the whole world on three fronts for four years to fight against each other in the streets of their capital cities. They went to war against the world for two ideals—patriotism and progress; and now these two ideals had themselves collided in civil war.

Of the two German ideals, that of patriotism is the one we know best. That dull devotion and forced fervour that fights in massed formations to sentimental songs. It is a form of patriotism that does not appeal to us. To Athens Sparta is anti-pathetic. But there were fine fellows among the Spartans as well as tyrants and helots, and now that the tyrants are gone such as are left of the fine fellows have a chance of realising their Spartan ideals. Now that those trumpery tinsel tyrants, the Kaiser and his courtier generals, have retired to scribble and squabble and scuffle over dirty linen—a Valhalla of washerwomen—the men of the real Spartan breed, who carried the German arms from conquest to conquest until the catastrophe was complete, are working hard to restore ideals shattered by rout and revolution.

Of the real fine fellows that I've met in Germany half were officers and men who had responded to the various appeals for home defence and who were working to revive the old Spartan tradition in the war-wearied youth.

Here are two notices from the advertisement columns of the Lokal Anzeiger, which seem to me to contrast the real Spartan and the Junker:

"To all old soldiers of the Prince Moritz of Anhalt-Dessau Fifth Pomeranian Infantry Regt., No. 42. Regimental Comrades! From day to day the impudence of the Poles increases. From day to day they seize more German land and more German food. From day to day they come nearer to—they claim more of—our Old Pomerania. All you brave old 42nd who ever undefeated have defended German soil against more formidable foes, rejoin your beloved regiment to defend your homes against the ungrateful Poles to liberate whom so many of your comrades died. Report to Headquarters, Stralsund. Conditions of service are pay, allowances, etc., as on active service with 5 mks. extra daily, and a fortnight's notice. Obedience required to military regulations and to those in authority, with whom are associated councils of delegates. Signed F——, member of Soldiers' Council, First Lieut. K——Regimental Commandant."

Note the signature of the representative of the Soldaten-Rat preceding that of the Commandant.

In those days even Frei-Corps recruited in this manner had their Soldiers' Councils. And it was the remains of this Council organisation that prevented these Corps from being used to overthrow the Republic in the coup-d'état planned when the treaty was signed.

Compare now the appeal of the Junker—a Vortanzer no doubt at many a Court Ball and a flunkey still.

"Officer of elegant appearance and engaging manners with experience of polite society, seeks employment. Would undertake to supervise restaurant."

Moreover, as a result of class war, the students, hitherto always the Young Guard of revolution in Germany, have this time taken sides with what may well be called reaction. In the various volunteer corps—the "Noske Guards"—that are used for fighting the revolutionary troops and the workmen, the largest and best elements are young ex-officers or N.C.O.'s and students.

I remember when a workmen's meeting was broken up by a picket of the Reinhard Corps noting that the privates almost all wore pince-nez. The workmen called them mercenaries and murderers, but it was absurd to accuse fine young men who looked like Balliol, with a leaven of Blues and Bloods, of selling themselves for eight shillings a day and extra rations. These Spartans and their ideals will be heard of again unless Germany is given a square deal and a fair field.

And the other half of the fine fellows I've met in Germany were Spartacists—fighters for the ideal of progress. For this ideal has had in Germany as many devotees as the other. No country had so large a radical and revolutionary political element as Germany before the war. In no country did the economics and politics of Socialism occupy so many minds. Sovietism is only a rough Russian realisation of German ideals. The rebellion under Spartacus of revolted gladiators and escaped slaves, which challenged for years the imperialism and militarism of Rome, does give some idea of what these men are and what their cause is.

The handsomest and most intelligent man I've met in Germany was a Spartacist, a film actor by profession. The last time I saw him—with a rifle slung over his shoulder and stick bombs in his belt—he explained what he was fighting for. German militarism, he said, had revived, encouraged by the Entente attitude; the present Government was as much in the hands of reactionary officers as any during the war. The war had crippled militarism, but only real revolution, the council system, could kill it. He was glad he had escaped the war, so as to have a life to offer to the right side. The next day he was taken and shot.

Now, I do not intend to convey that the Germany of to-day is a fighting country. It is quite the reverse. But a section of idealists at each extreme has decided that they are bound to die for their ideals as Spartans or Spartacists. That they will die in vain is inevitable. If only because there is no Sparta and no Spartacus. There is no German land where such an ideal as that of the reactionary "Spartans" can now be realised, not even in rural Prussia; and there is no Spartacus to command and control the "Spartakists" of Germany. But there is another reason also—that there are too few young Germans left.

On a Sunday morning I went to the Academy of Singing to hear old German music. One number on the programme, "A Scottish Ballad of a Lost Battle," proved to be a translation of Lady Lindsay's "Lament After Flodden." Sung to a plaintive eighteenth century air, with the thin far-away accompaniment of lute and spinet, it was like an echo from the lost battles and lost beauty of all time. With bowed heads and tear-filled eyes, men and women sat silent long after the last heartrending refrain had died away.

In the afternoon I went out to the "Greenwood" of Berlin, a district of pine woods, hills, and lakes, where the young people of Berlin used to flock for picnics and water-parties. The Berliners are noisy in their enjoyments, and on Sunday afternoons before the war the woods of the Havelland would ring with shouting and singing and laughter, with feasting and flirting, as though Pan himself held festival.

To-day a few girls were there wandering sadly through the silent woods, pale ghosts of dead delights, and there was no sound but the sighing of the pines—

"Sair moaning in ilka green loaning,
The flowers o' the forest are a' wede awa'."

CHAPTER III[ToC]

THE COUNCIL REPUBLICS

The first result of the failure of German Liberalism and of the Weimar Assembly was that revolution and reaction came into active collision with each other in the provincial capitals.

These two conflicts ran concurrently, and collision in the provinces was a necessary consequence of collision in the capital. Moreover, when the revolution had failed twice to assert itself by force in Berlin, it stood little chance of surviving in Bavaria, Brunswick, or Bremen. Such spontaneous and sporadic appeals to force met by organised police measures and prosecutions only prevented the Socialist party from reuniting, and forced German politics into a duel between the propertied classes and the proletariat, in which the latter had no prospect of success.

This duel started in Berlin in the December and January conflicts which were settled in favour of the Government, and its subsequent continuance in the provinces had the same result.

The outbreaks in the coast ports and the coal districts of Westphalia were remote, and their unexpectedly easy repression by flying columns only confirmed the Government in a policy of coercion. The outbreaks in Munich and the south were outside the political orbit in which the Government was moving. If the spread of the general strike from the west to Saxony, which broke Germany in two and cut Berlin off from Weimar, was more serious, yet the Maerker column soon succeeded, in removing any danger to Weimar and in reopening communications with Berlin. These outbreaks were not formidable enough to force the Government to depart from its policy of suppressing not only revolts, but the revolution.

But the general strike and street fighting in Eastern Berlin during March although it was intentionally exaggerated so as to impress Paris with the Bolshevist danger, did for a few days imperil not only the Scheidemann Government, but the whole Parliamentary system. Both were consequences of the coalition which by giving the Government a class basis had made it quite incapable of going halfway to meet the revolutionary demands for recognition of the Council System and for socialisation. At first, party ties had held the moderate mass of the Social-Democratic workmen; but as time passed and the middle-class mentality of the men in power became more and more marked, dissatisfaction with the Government and defections to the Opposition grew rapidly. Even Vorwärts admitted there was cause of complaint.

In vain did the Government poster the streets with pathetic protests that "socialisation is already here," and issued manifestoes pointing to its legislative achievements—Eight-Hour Day, Unemployment Benefit, Land Settlement, what we should call "Whitley Councils" in coal-mining districts, War Pensions, and Repeal of War Measures. These had already been put in force provisionally by the previous Government, and did not amount to much any way. In vain did the Government profess its intention of pushing through the two Bills approving, in principle, nationalisation of coal mines and potash deposits; for no one wanted nationalisation except as a step to socialisation. The workmen felt that the Government was, as one put it to me, "a revolution profiteer." It had perverted the purposes and pocketed the profits of the revolution. They felt that Weimar, as another one expressed it, was only a "soviet of profiteers" and would produce no socialist legislation.

The revolutionary opponents of the Coalition saw their opportunity, but their leaders could secure no combination or concerted action. Nothing, indeed, was more surprising than the incapacity of the Germans to associate and organise for a political purpose.

The general impression one got was that Germany had so grown to look on political responsibility as the function of a specialised class that they never could consider anyone outside that class as capable of replacing any member of it. We see something of the same sort of helplessness growing up in England, where it is becoming increasingly difficult for the man in the street to conceive a Cabinet formed from outside a small clique of the ruling class. And the German revolutionaries of the Opposition showed themselves as incapable of making use of their opportunities as did their Liberal opponents in the Government. The game was in the revolutionaries' hands in the early months of the year if they could have combined. But the different disturbed districts declared war on the Government at just such intervals of time as allowed them to be conveniently beaten in detail by very small forces. Each district again was divided into all manner of dissentient organisations in different stages of development. In some the Councils were really representative, in others they had co-opted themselves; while there were as many kinds of revolutionary corps as of Councils.

In Berlin alone there were some ten different corps. A leader of one of the last insurgent parties to hold out, told me, during an attack by the Government troops, that it was not the great disparity of numbers and munitions that had defeated him, but the difficulty of getting the revolutionaries to work together.

Moreover, the issue between reaction and revolution in Berlin was fought out in two different and quite distinct conflicts, that were invariably confused by the foreign Press. One took the form of strikes the other of street fighting. The general strike was the resistance of the Workmen's Council organisations to suppression by the middle-class Ministry. The street fighting was the resistance of the remains of the old revolutionary forces to suppression by the new Frei-Corps "mercenaries" of the reaction. The two developed concurrently though with little connection.

The strikes that were always breaking out everywhere for no apparent reason culminated in the Berlin general strike of March. This general strike was forced on the reluctant Majority Socialists by the Independents, themselves propelled by the Communists. For these two latter controlled the Executive Committee of the Berlin Councils. But though the Majority Socialists did not oppose the general strike, they did their best to make it a failure, and when, after three days, the Communists pressed for its extension to water, gas, electricity, and food supply in order to support the fighting Spartacists, the Majoritarians withdrew, and by the end of the week the strike was declared off. The Majority Socialists' proposal for unconditional surrender was rejected, that of the Independents for surrender on conditions of amnesty accepted, and the conditions were agreed to by the Government. Thereupon the Left of the Communists, including the brilliant Clara Zetkin, took the opportunity of this crisis and of the party caucus (Parteitag) then sitting in Berlin to secede to the Spartacists.

The loss of their Left wing was, however, more than compensated to the Independents by the movement leftward in the ranks of the Social-Democrats, the supporters of the Government. And this leftward trend was accentuated by disapproval of the action of the Government in bombarding whole quarters of Berlin and in shooting wholesale its political opponents. This rapid response of the Council system to a trend in public opinion was in strong contrast to the irresponsive inertia of the Weimar Assembly, which remained representative only of a nationalist mood, and remote from the whole Socialist movement.

The Ministry had to give to the political pressure. Already before the strike it indicated concessions as to industrial socialisation and constitutional sanction of the Councils, and these were elaborated and established by negotiations at Weimar with missions sent from the Central and Executive Councils. These concessions were in principle very considerable, and much more than could ever have been imposed in practical application on the Centrum supporters of the Government. The result of this crisis was therefore to prepare the way for a reconstruction of the Government on a moderate Socialist basis, between a Centrum-Conservative opposition to the Right and a Communist to the Left. This would have represented the true balance of political power at the time; and the fact that it would not have had a majority at Weimar would have been only a formal difficulty.

But this, the natural, solution was made impossible by the extraordinary severity with which the armed resistance to the Government was punished. For this severity made it impossible for even the most moderate Independents to join the Government. And this fighting was not a development of the strike, but of the campaign carried on by the Government with volunteer flying columns against the revolutionary corps throughout Germany.

Of these corps, of which there were many in Berlin, the most important were the Republican Guard and the Marine Division. The former had from the first supported the Government, while the Marine Division of Kiel sailors had already been in collision with it in December. The other corps were all more or less in opposition, and some were mere camouflage for bad characters. Until these corps were dispersed the constitutional Government had no complete control of Berlin apart from their "Council" rival, the Executive Committee. A first step was made towards their suppression by the arrest of sixty ringleaders; whereupon the Marine Division and the other corps prepared for resistance, with the assistance of the Spartacist irregulars and a rabble of roughs and rascals. These were joined later by about half the Republican Guard, which had come into collision with the Frei-Corps—the Government volunteer contingents. The strikers, however, took no part in the fighting.

The strike was declared on a Monday; Tuesday passed in preparations by the regulars and plunderings by the rabble, and on Wednesday the garrisons of Government buildings in the east central district of Berlin were attacked and besieged. They were hard pressed, but held out, being supplied by aeroplane until relieved by an offensive of the Government's troops on Thursday afternoon. For some hours a tremendous bombardment was carried on round the Alexanderplatz and neighbouring streets, but the damage to property though considerable could only have been as little as it was if at least half the "hows" and "minnies" had been firing blank; for the benefit rather of the correspondents than of the insurgents. The insurgents' positions were eventually made untenable by aeroplane observation and bombing. During the following days they were driven, with terrific fusillades and some fighting, through the east end into the suburbs, where the bombardments were continued for no obvious reason for several days.

Berlin will long remember those Ides of March. So shall I, not because of Thursday's fighting—you could generally get your fill of such fighting in Germany those days—but because on that Thursday I got a real lunch. It was a good lunch—oysters, veal cutlets, and pancakes. It was given me by a banker, and cost just about four shillings a mouthful. I know, because I counted them. And in the cellars of the same house were families living on 5 lbs. of bad potatoes and 5 lbs. of black bread a week.

The banker and I were enemies, and I was nominally and nationally engaged in starving him; though, as members of our respective Independent Labour Parties, we were politically working in the same cause. And a few streets away men of one race and one class were killing each other respectively in the names of Law and Liberty. Such was European civilisation in the year of Our Lord 1919.

But probably you are more interested in the fighting; so, if you like, I will take you two excursions through it. We will start the first on Thursday afternoon, when the insurgent soldiers and Spartacists were trying to force their way westward from their base in the east end, across the Spree, past the Schloss, to the Linden, and the Government troops were trying to drive them eastward. The main battleground was the Alexanderplatz, from which radiate the main thoroughfares leading east.

At the west end of the Linden all is much as usual. Instead of the omnibuses laid up by the general strike long German farm carts drawn by ponies are carrying passengers perched on planks resting on packing-cases. Lorries with mounted machine-guns patrol up and down, and machine-gun pickets guard all important buildings. As we go east the roadway empties and the traffic on the pavements thickens into hesitating groups all facing eastward, or knots encircling some political discussion. Further on the roadway is blocked by artillery of the Lüttwitz Volunteer Corps going into action—field-guns, trench mortars, and minenwerfer, the latter towed behind lorries loaded with the missiles, great brown conical cylinders 4 ft. high. Here, too, is the first cordon, and the game of "passes" begins.

The main rules are not to revoke by playing a pass from the wrong side, and not to put on a higher card than is necessary. I take this trick with quite a low card, the Foreign Office pass. At the next cordon I try quite a good card—a pink Weimar Press pass with a photograph, but he won't have it. I go one better with a British passport, Royal Arms and all, but he trumps this by shoving his rifle under my nose and saying, "Be off!" I have still a special pass from the Kommandantur, and, best of all, a visiting card with "Noske" scribbled on it, but the game is over here. These Government volunteers, boys of eighteen or nineteen, shoot from the hip or anyhow, and are all on hair triggers.

We try round another way. A soldier with a rifle at the ready comes down the middle of the empty street scanning the windows. "Window shut," he shouts, aiming at one. A red poster proclaims that anyone loitering will be shot at. We are now in the danger zone. A lorry hurries forward, the bottom spread with brown stained mattresses. The noise becomes bewildering—the crack of roof snipers and the rap of the machine-guns are incessant. A field-gun is banging away round the corner, and that heavy boom is a minenwerfer shelling the Alexanderplatz.

The main struggle has already passed into the roads radiating eastward, which the insurgents are barricading hastily, while others on tugs retreat south down the Spree. But of this fight we can only see the aeroplanes swooping a few hundred feet over the roofs and bombing the machine-gun nests. An insurgent plane engages for a few minutes, but retires outnumbered. The battle is over; though fighting will go on for days as the troops drive the insurgents from one street to another through the eastern quarter out into the suburbs.

And now it is the following Tuesday, and I will take you for our second excursion into the insurgent camp at Lichtenberg—the most easterly suburb of Berlin, where the main body still holds out. This morning's Government bulletin has told us that the victorious Government troops have cleared the whole East End, except Lichtenberg, which is encircled with a "ring of steel." That several thousand insurgents have barricaded all approaches and are sweeping them with field-guns. That they have destroyed hundreds of tons of flour. That they have shot sixty—a hundred—two hundred prisoners. That others have been torn in pieces by the mob, which has taken wounded from the ambulances and clubbed them to death. That no one in a decent coat can venture on the street without being murdered. That in consequence of these "bestial atrocities" anyone found with arms will be shot. But we've read war bulletins before!

On our way we pass a convoy of prisoners, hands handcuffed behind their backs, armed motor-cars before and behind. A young soldier blazes off several shots to scatter the crowd, at which a well-dressed woman remonstrates, but she is at once arrested and put with the convoy.

Here we are at the Warschauer Brücke over the Spree, where there is an imposing concourse of steel-helmeted troops and guns, and a cordon. We pass this after being searched for arms, and across the bridge come on a lot of guns and machine-guns firing fiercely down the Warschauer Strasse, though there is no audible reply or visible reason. After watching the shells holing houses, we start working our way round to the south through empty streets, keeping close to the house-fronts and taking cover when bullets whisper a warning. At last crowded streets again, and through them to a broad avenue crossed by shallow trenches and ramshackle barricades—the much-bulletined Frankfurter Allee. Here an insurgent picket takes charge of us and undertakes to bring us to the secret Headquarters.

"But where are your field-guns?" we ask.

"Field-guns? We haven't any," they say, surprised.

"And how do you keep the troops in check?"

"Oh, those boys! Two of us take machine-guns, charge with them down each side of the street, and they run."

"And how many of you are there?"

"Some two or three hundred perhaps—it varies, but we're all old soldiers—we allow no boys to fight for us."

"And have you shot the sixty policemen you took in the Lichtenberg station?"

"Sixty policemen? There aren't that number in all Lichtenberg. Two got shot defending the station, but after they surrendered to a quarter of their number we let them all go home. You can go and see any of them."

It is impossible not to believe these intelligent, even intellectual and eminently honest faces. So the sixty policemen follow the field-guns and the "ring of steel" into the limbo of "White" lies.

We pass a railway goods yard where plundered flour is being carried away in sacks.

"Where is that going?" we ask.

"To the bakers, and afterwards to be distributed gratis to the crowd."

We see later women with red crosses distributing loaves from a cart to women and children. We reach our destination, only to be warned by a woman just in time that it is now occupied by troops—a narrow escape that so shakes the nerve of our guide that he takes refuge in a dressing station improvised in a shop. Here are "neutral" doctors and nurses, very angry at the bombardment of crowded tenement houses and the reckless shooting by the young volunteers. They run great risks, as robbers have so often misused the Red Cross that it is now no protection against the Government troops. Here are many wounded, mostly women and children, and but a few fighters. The latter all indignantly deny having shot prisoners, though they know the other side are doing it. And then at last to the evasive Headquarters, where the leaders tell us of what they hope to achieve by this desperate resistance of a few hundred men armed with rifles and bombs against as many thousands armed with all the machinery of modern war.

"Noske," they say, "is only a puppet in the hands of Majors Gilsa and Hammerstein, and they are agents of the Eden Hotel, the headquarters of the Cavalry Guard and the centre of reaction. The old story again of Bethmann-Hollweg, Ludendorff, and the General Staff, militarism and monarchism is what all this bombardment means, for they want to convince the Entente that they must have a large standing Army. They have just raised the pay and doubled the rations of these young mercenaries. Why don't the Entente abolish them and insist on a Swiss Militia here?

"If this White Guard goes on, we shall organise a Red Guard, and we shall win. But that will mean Bolshevism. We are not Bolsheviks, but Socialists to-day. We have offered to keep order in Berlin and here, with a militia representing all parties, but they go on bombarding. It is the old Prussian terrorism again. They have learnt nothing from the war."

And, so, in the twilight, back the way we came, wondering at the working of moral laws that have now subjected Berlin to a self-inflicted punishment of bombardments and bombings worse than any of those it inflicted on other cities.

Firing heavy artillery at crowded tenement houses, even with reduced charges and plentiful blank, means a butcher's bill of several thousands, mostly women and children, and damage to property of several millions.

Next day we extract the following from the advertisement sheet of our daily paper:—

"Reinhard Brigade. Mine-Throwers."

"Officers, non-commissioned officers and men with mine-thrower training urgently required. Comrades! Consider the crisis! Come and help! Spartacus must be crushed with every weapon. Report to the Brigade Reinhard, at the New Criminal Court, Turmerstrasse 91."

"Obituary."

"On the 12th March, innocent victims of these troubled times, through the destruction of my house by a mine-thrower, my little Adolf and Bertha, aged 12 and 8 years."

The behaviour of the Government can only be explained by their having left the whole matter to Noske, who, in turn, left it to his military advisers, Majors Gilsa, Pabst, and Hammerstein, who again were agents only of the militarist reactionary faction. This faction intended to exploit the crisis by killing two birds with one stone—the anti-Bolshevists at Paris and the pro-Bolshevists at Berlin. Their policy was to make an excuse for raising a large professional army with which to suppress the revolution and, if the gods were kind, to restore Germany's ancient régime and its racial frontiers. For this purpose atrocities were invented as a pretext for reprisals and for recruiting and raising the pay of the Frei-Corps. The Government could have kept order of a sort through the revolutionary corps if it had kept in touch with the revolutionary councils; but it fought the corps with flying columns of under-trained over-armed boys, and it fought the councils with its patched-up majority of old parliamentary hands and party hacks.

In the resultant civil war that raged, and still rages, all over Germany one may distinguish certain combats more decisive than the others. There were the conflicts in Berlin—of December against the Marine Division, of January against the Spartacists, and of March against the Republican Guard and other corps. In the provinces, the expeditions against Bremen, Halle, Brunswick, and Munich. I saw nothing of the first of these, but something of the fall of the revolutionary movements of Halle, Brunswick, and Munich. And with each of these failures ended some distinctive element of the German revolution. With each of these failures the German revolution took a fresh impetus and a more extreme form.

The trouble at Bremen was merely a collision between the centre of the renascent reaction at Berlin and the original source of the revolution among the soldiers and sailors of the seaboard towns. The revolution first broke out at Bremen and was spread from there by parties of sailors who established themselves in the leading towns of the interior, including Berlin; and wherever they settled they became the "Red Guard" of the revolution. Bremen was therefore not only the Bethlehem of the new gospel, but was also the key position to the control of the coast. And this control was indispensable to the Government, which was negotiating with the Allies for the importation of foodstuffs in mitigation of the blockade. For the revolutionary extremists, recognising that the blockade was breeding revolt, kept throwing every difficulty in the way of importing food. They first refused to allow the German steamers to sail under the agreement, and then refused to allow foodstuffs to be unloaded. The Government were thus forced, probably not unwillingly, into military action against the revolution in the interests of famine relief. When Gerstenberg's flying column occupied Bremen in February with little serious fighting, the revolutionary policy of barring off Germany from the conservative West and turning it towards the Council government of Russia finally failed. The desperate plan of strangling and starving Germany into revolution was defeated by the German middle class, who preferred, even at the cost of immediate civil war, to go into economic slavery to France and England rather than to go into political outlawry with Russia. The fall of Bremen really finished all immediate chances of Russian "Bolshevism" in Germany.

The Halle affair in March was a less crucial business, though critical enough for a time. The Saxon towns had been in a state of economic unrest that increased as the impotence of the Weimar Assembly became more obvious. Thus the smaller towns in the immediate neighbourhood of Weimar, like Erfurt and Jena, became outposts of revolution, permanently menacing the deliberations of the Assembly in the classic groves of the Ilm. Small bands of revolutionaries even penetrated Weimar itself, until the roads and railways were barred. It was some weeks before the Saxon Frei-Corps of Jagers, under General Maerker, were strong enough to attempt expeditions against the smaller Thuringian towns. And the General himself had, in these early days, more than one narrow escape. His small force was still very weak in numbers and discipline when a general strike was declared at Halle, with the avowed political object of cutting communications between the Legislature at Weimar and the Administration at Berlin. Obviously, if Weimar could be seized, or even surrounded by the revolutionaries, the parliamentary system of government must collapse and a revolutionary Saxony would divide the Prussian bureaucrats from the South German burghers. This plan—if plan it was—and not merely a process of inchoate and unconscious forces, was defeated by the Maerker expedition to Halle; and those who are interested in the outside as well as the inside of political events may learn something of what the civil war in Germany was like in the following diary of my experiences with this expedition.

Friday Afternoon.—The green room of the Weimar Theatre—now the National Assembly—and the War Minister Noske on a sofa, a big beetle-browed, bullet-headed type of German, a Bismarck Mk. II., but evidently underfed and overstrained. On a chair a sharp-nosed intelligence officer, for War Ministers must be careful these days who they see and what they say. After some talk I ask leave to go with the Government troops who are to reopen the rail to Berlin by occupying Halle. The intelligence officer demurs, but Noske good humouredly agrees to my arguments, scribbles a word or two on the back of my card, and hurries off to catch the Berlin train. He will have to spend all night going round by Chemnitz and Dresden.

Friday Midnight.—A fourth-class carriage in the third of three troop trains conveying 4,000 men and 20 guns to Halle. Five of us are perched on the narrow wooden seats; two officers in mufti, and two Halle deputies going as Government delegates, one a brisk little Democrat, the other a patriarchal Social-Democrat, in a long white beard and a broad black hat. We make the best of it. One officer has a candle, the other a stock of war adventures; I have a bottle of wine and a budget of news from outside; the patriarch has sections of an eel and views on the food question, which he roars like a hungry lion. Bump! we are mostly on the floor. The engine of No. 2 has broken down, and we have trodden on and derailed its tail. We pile into train No. 1, and get cushioned seats. The officers snore, the patriarch dozes, rumbling like a distant storm. Only the little Democrat sits brooding. "Oh, Halle! Halle!" he mutters, "that I should ever come to you like this."

Saturday Morning.—The General and I are marching up the road to Halle; behind us officers in mufti, beside us the head of the column of volunteers. The little General is telling me this is the seventh town he and his flying column have occupied, but the first real big one. An expert in Bolshevist busting, this tiny General of a toy army, with the face and manner of a dear demure little old maiden lady. He ignores politely the women and boys, who are shouting, "Bloodhounds!" "Brutes!" "Vultures!" "Vermin!" and salutes scrupulously any burgher bold enough to wave.

So we enter Halle, pass the factories and skyscrapers, where the hands live stacked in tiers, and then occupy the station yard. The General with a few officers and men, marches straight through the great deserted station into the guardroom of the insurgent troops. The guard, taken by surprise, seize their rifles, and some cock and point them, shouting threats. The little General raps out an order like a machine-gun, and after a long half-minute a man drops his rifle, the others follow suit, and all file out—one shouting in a heart-broken voice, "Is this all we can do?" A deputation of sailors arrives, fine upstanding fellows, with intelligent faces. These are the real fighters, and some hundreds of them are occupying a building in the town. They have probably only come to find out what chance there is of holding it, and the guns outside are answer enough, for they leave abruptly. The General sends a summons to evacuate after them, and they have cleared before their building is surrounded. "Those cursed blue boys," says a young officer. "What wouldn't I have done for them during the war, and now they've brought us to this."

Saturday Afternoon.—The General with a few officers and a half-company, is walking down to the Town Hall to arrange with the local authorities. I am congratulating him on everything being so well over—and add, as I see the market-place ahead packed with people and ugly-looking roughs hooting us—that in England things would be about going to begin. I've hardly said it before they do begin. The crowd, annoyed at the hauling down of the red flag and hoisting of the red, white, and black, storms the Town Hall, tears the machine-guns and rifles from our guard there, and smashes them, seizes a motor and an ambulance, which it afterwards runs blazing into the river, and carries off two officers, whom it shuts up in the Red Tower, a mediæval fortress. They then turn on our little party, which is in rapid retreat on the Post Office, but we stand them off until we are behind the iron gates. An angry mob howls outside, but when they get to shaking or scaling the gates a movement from the sentries inside is enough still to stop them. At last reinforcements arrive, forcing their way through the crowd, which, however, falls on the last files and tries to haul them off. We sally out and pull them in, shouting to the soldiers, now as angry as the mob, not to shoot. But already there comes the crack of rifles and the rattle of a machine-gun from another position up the street. Firing becomes general. The crowd scatters in all directions, and the empty streets round are picketed with machine-guns. The General, regardless of roof snipers, comes round, patting his young soldiers on the back. "Well," says he to me, "here we are, and the only question is, are we holding Halle or is Halle holding us?"

Saturday Evening.—A long table in the Post Office. At one end the little General, behind him two officers, one smiling, the other scowling. On his right the two "Independent" tribunes of the people, representing the workmen's councils, beyond them commandants of the local barracks, at the foot representatives of the burgher committee and the little Democrat, on the General's left representatives of the soldiers' council, probably students. The Patriarch has, however, disappeared, the march of events having been too rapid for him. The General is very short with the student soldiers, and very urbane with the Independent politicians who are or were in control of Halle—one is another Bismarck type, Mk. III. this time, the other a Bernard Shaw Mk. II. A strong combination of authority with audacity; but I doubt the General with his steel-helmeted troops and machine-guns will be stronger. Their case is that they kept order until the troops came, and they can only restore it if the troops go. The General and the burgher delegates accuse them of arming and agitating the proletariat, which they indignantly deny. The discussion is interrupted at intervals by the irruption of dingy individuals, who report disorders and discoveries, and I suspect the General of having realised the dramatic value of the messenger in Greek tragedy. Finally, the two tribunes agree to put out posters that the troops have nothing to do with the strike, and must be let alone. This negative result horrifies the burghers, and the General, leaving the table, is besieged by earwigging notables imploring him to arrest the two tribunes. "I saw them leaving the house that fired the first shot," hisses a flabby frock-coated party with a grog-blossomy nose. "Bernard Shaw" overhears him, but only strokes his thin beard and his moustaches curl in a cynical smile. He knows the General knows his business.

Saturday Midnight.—I've been out and in through the pickets and among the armed parties of the other side several times, and a major in mufti and I are going out to a hotel. Two journalists who've made their way in, and regret it, decide to follow us. Nearing the cleared street, we turn up a side street and come right on an armed party. The journalists, a few paces behind, bolt round the corner, which leads to our being stopped and questioned. I engage their attention all I can to give the major a chance of slipping off, which he wisely does. Unfortunately, this gives time for a larger crowd to gather than I can manage, and they march me off to the market-place, where they become a mob. Ugly roughs and excited boys keep pressing in, and several have seen me with the General. The ring round me gets savage, and I have increasing difficulty in keeping those round me quiet. A man shouts at me in Russian, asking whether I'm from Joffe. I repudiate Joffe, but knowing Russian gets me a friend or two. One calls up some armed sailors and persuades them to take me to their guard-house. A plucky little burgher who has been appearing and disappearing in the welter attaches himself to the party. The crowd follows until a machine-gun opens near by and scatters it. Our party gets smaller each time we run or shelter from the machine-guns, which are playing on the plundering parties. I find the burgher will take me in if I get rid of the escort, so, distributing some small notes, I suggest we should all be better off at home. Some agree, others object, but a machine-gun closures the debate without a division and I spend the night on the friendly burgher's sofa.

Sunday Morning.—I hear from the burgher that an aide-de-camp of the General caught by the mob in mufti with the General's orders in his pocket, soon after my escape, has been thrown into the river and shot as he swam. The town is still in the hands of the revolutionaries, but quite quiet except round the buildings held by the troops. After changing my appearance and borrowing the burgher's hat, I go round in a crowd of Sunday sightseers staring at the looted shops and the bullet-starred houses. Near the Post Office there is sniping from the roofs, and a hand grenade is thrown almost on top of us. There are ugly red blotches in the streets among the broken glass. Running the gauntlet of the pickets, I find the General very glad to see me. The scowling officer shows me a sniper behind a chimney-pot who has just shot the smiling officer. The situation militarily and politically is temporarily at a deadlock, and the only interest in staying is the risk of being sniped in the Post Office or mobbed in the town. The General offers me a passage to Weimar with the "flying post."

Sunday Afternoon.—The Halle flying ground. While one of the few planes left is being patched up the officer is telling me of his difficulties. He daren't leave the men alone for an hour. The plane with the post for Weimar I travel with has to be represented as going to Magdeburg, or the men might stop its starting. He holds on because the planes are indispensable to the Government, but when he came back from the front, and the orders and badges were torn from his coat, "something broke in him." His family has always been military, but now it's over, and he is going to the Argentine. But my pilot is tougher stuff. A man of the middle class, pilot since 1912, fighting scout through the war, a friend of the great fliers and of Fokker, he had had good openings abroad. "But no," says he; "Germany's going down out of control, but if it crashes I crash with it."

So after careful scrutiny to see that nothing has been half sawn through, as it was a few days before, we climb in. The roar of the motor drowns the distant rattle of the machine-guns, and Halle disappears below into the dusk as we drive into the red glare of the setting sun.

Germany at this time was like a seething pot. Outbreaks such as that at Halle were only bubbles breaking out on the surface. At any moment one expected the whole heaving, simmering mass to boil over. But, wherever a centre of ebullition declared itself the Government quenched the upheaval with a douche of Frei-Corps.

Such a centre from the first days of revolution was Brunswick. Indeed, Brunswick had been such a centre of disturbance from the earliest days of German history. The chronicles of Brunswick show the workmen of that town always in the van not only of German but of European movements. They were indeed Bolsheviks as early as 1292; and it was largely owing to the improvement in the workmen's position that they forced on the German towns in the following century that the general risings of the proletariat, that led to civil war in England and France, were in Saxony comparatively bloodless.[1]

And, as soon as the revolution broke out in the North Sea Coast towns, Brunswick gave it its first welcome to the interior. Bodies of sailors, travelling up from the coast as the vanguard of revolution, had established it in Brunswick, the day after the first outbreak at Wilhelmshaven; and thereafter Brunswick threw itself wholeheartedly into a real revolutionary régime.

The little State of Brunswick consists of the mediæval town and a ring of industrial suburbs separate from the town, with satellite rural townlets and villages. The political life and vital heat of Brunswick centre now in this mushroom ring of factories, where the old rebel character of the State is more truly reproduced than among the burghers and bauers of the dead town and dormant villages. Under pressure from the workmen in these factories Brunswick established a government that, unlike that of Berlin, was sufficiently revolutionary to attempt to realise the social revolution. When the inevitable split came between the Social-Democrats in power and the Independents in opposition, Brunswick declared for the Independents. The free Republic of Brunswick became a citadel of the Independent extremists, a centre of revolutionary propaganda and a corpus vile for the application of revolutionary principles. And it was unfortunate that it made itself so obnoxious to its big neighbour, Berlin, in its first two characters that its services in the third capacity were overlooked. For Brunswick was working out a régime which was in fact a compromise between the revolutionary institutions of council government and the established parliamentary system of its constitutional Government. True parliamentary institutions had under the leadership of extremists like Merges been relegated rather to the background. But they had not been abolished and remained ready to function, when required, as a sort of Second Chamber and conservative counterbalance to the radical régime of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils. Nor had this régime so far as I could ascertain done any irremediable material harm, while it had certainly done real moral service. The propertied and professional classes had been alarmed certainly; but had learnt to defend themselves very effectively by strikes and refusal of taxes, and had thereby obtained recognition of their rights as a numerical minority. Feeling, of course, ran high; but the freedom of speech of the burghers was never curtailed while the workmen's party was in power. Of course, the workmen's leader, the hunchback tailor Merges, was represented as a sort of ogre throughout Germany, but the Brunswick burghers rather despised than dreaded him. Their opinion of the rule of the "Arbeiter Rat," or Workmen's Board, is expressed in these lines pasted on the pedestal of the equestrian statue representing Duke William of ever pious and still immortal memory (obiit, 1884).

"Good Old Bill, if you'll get down,
Merges shall give up your crown.
We'll put you on the Board, of course,
And put the tailor on your horse."

As reaction developed at Berlin and revolution at Brunswick it became evident that once again in its history a bullying Berlin would bash a bumptious Brunswick. This simple solution as between the two centres of the main conflict that has divided Germany was delayed by cross complications coming from conflicts belonging to another plane, and to an older chapter. Brunswick town, unlike Halle or Hamburg, was a free Republic—more than that it was a semi-sovereign State. The semi-sovereign rights of the lesser German States were one of the ancient bulwarks used by the reactionary government as defences against a levelling revolution. They were particularly dear to the Centrum supporters of the Government as the temporal entrenchments of the Clerical position. And so the free and Independent republicans of Brunswick had a longer lease of power than might have been expected.

Finally, political and personal considerations combined to overcome the reluctance of the Berlin Government to take military action against a Free State. As usual the personal factor probably forced the decision and the incident throws a sidelight on German politics of this period.

Magdeburg, an industrial town on the main line between Berlin and Brunswick and on the borders of Brunswick State, had been a political stronghold of Majoritarian Social-Democracy. But it had been so affected by the drift of the workmen to the left that by the end of April the Independents believed they had a majority in that parliamentary constituency. Now the representative of this constituency was the moving spirit, the Machiavelli, of the ministry—Landsberg. This Polish Jew has already been referred to as the brains of the Government. He, as representing Majoritarian Social Democracy and Erzberger as representing middle-class Clericalism, were the cement of the coalition between Social-Democracy and the Centrum, a coalition based on love of office and fear of the Opposition. So Landsberg finding his own seat threatening defection to the Opposition and joining a general strike of the Saxon towns, went down to Magdeburg. But on his arrival he was seized by the revolutionaries, put in a car, and sent off to Brunswick to be held to ransom. This kidnapping of the reactionary Minister of Justice, second only to Noske himself in importance, was a score for the revolution. But a red Jew is kittle cattle to drive. Landsberg escaped from his captors, and within a few days General Maerker and his merry men were marching on Magdeburg from Halle. Magdeburg was occupied after slight resistance, and became the base for operations against Brunswick. Only a casus belli was required and this was supplied when Brunswick, encouraged by the Munich revolution, proclaimed a "Räte Republik," and invited the Saxon towns to rally to the revolution and the "Soviet system." This was immediately countered by the officials and clerks of Brunswick organising a strike that crippled the Prussian railway and the German postal and telegraph system. Whereupon Berlin declared that it had ground for intervention in Brunswick, the State frontier was closed and Frei-Corps expeditions advanced from Magdeburg and Hanover. Skirmishes occurred at Helmstadt, Borsum and Wolfenbüttel and both sides had losses. Brunswick called off the general strike, protested against the violation of State right and tried to make terms. There followed a pause in the operations during which the moderates on both sides were trying to arrange matters. Meantime the Communists and Council revolutionaries of Brunswick were preparing resistance, in the confidence that the revolutionaries of the Saxon towns would rise in the rear of the troops; while the reactionaries were mobilising rapidly tanks and howitzers with the intention of giving the Revolution the coup de grâce. It was at this moment that I decided to go to Brunswick partly to study its revolutionary institutions before they were wiped out, partly to prevent bloodshed if possible by informing the revolutionary leaders as to the small prospect of Brunswick, if it resisted, getting any support from Saxony or Prussia. It was not an easy journey and the following account of it from my diary may serve as an illustration of Germany at this time.

Monday Evening.—The notorious Eden Hotel, headquarters of the Berlin garrison and military police. I am waiting for a permit to go with the expedition against Brunswick. When I went with the same troops against Halle a month ago I got my permit from Noske himself, but the captain in charge at the Eden Hotel is only second in real importance to the War Minister. There is, I suppose, a War Office and General Staff still, with generals and colonels, but the Government is based on the volunteer corps and they are run from the Eden Hotel. And now Brunswick, not for the first time, has championed the cause of German revolution and challenged Berlin, which has become, not for the first time, the centre of German reaction. And Berlin has determined to bash the head of revolution in Brunswick as it broke its back in Halle. True, Brunswick is a free State with its own constitution, which only differs from that of Prussia in preserving the principles of the November revolution; but it has become a centre of revolutionary opposition connecting the industrial districts of Westphalia with those of Saxony. There has been a plan for concerted action. Brunswick has given the signal too soon and realised its mistake too late. Brunswick, says the Eden Hotel, will fight in the hope of support from the Saxon towns, not knowing that they will not rise, for it has been isolated for a week.

Tuesday Morning.—A fourth-class carriage in the "parliamentary" to Magdeburg. There are third-class carriages, but a haversack on the floor is more comfortable than a straight-backed wooden bench. But imagine traffic between London and Derby reduced to three trains daily, two of which stop at every station. A peasant woman sitting on a sack is complaining:—"We get up at four every morning and work till dark. The cabbages and potatoes lie at the stations for days; the sun shines on them, the rain rains on them, and they rot—no trains—so we starve in the fields and you starve in the towns. A burgher frau tells how a barge load of American wheat has arrived at her town—"but what use is it at that price?" A man explains the high price is only for the extra ration and that most of it goes to make up the old ration at the old rate. "But," objects another, "we shall have to pay for it all the same, and we can't." "Emigration, that's what it means," says a soldier. "Why emigrate?" says a young man—"socialisation and Council Government are what's wanted, then the workmen will work and we can pay." You can hear more sound politics and economics now in fourth-class carriages than at Weimar, for hunger is the best political education. But—"Oh, politics, always politics now," protests a pretty girl The soldier gallantly responds and the debate becomes a Beatrice and Benedict duel, altogether too Shakespearean to report.

Tuesday Evening.—The General's headquarters. I hand my friend the General my credentials from my right-hand pocket, in my left are letters to Brunswick leaders. Public disorder makes for personal orderliness, and getting passes mixed in his pockets cost an officer acquaintance of mine his life lately. The General tells me he is marching against Brunswick—horse, foot and artillery—next evening. I can go ahead in the armoured train or an armoured car. But I explain this time I want to see the occupation from the other side and so must get into Brunswick well ahead. However, the General doesn't respond to my request to be set down outside Brunswick from one of the aeroplanes employed in distributing proclamations. Brunswick has been cut off by road and rail for days, and he evidently prefers it should remain so. Brunswick, he says, means to fight and must get a sharp lesson. Anyway it's impossible for anyone to get in now. And at first sight one would say he was right. Brunswick is sixty miles from Magdeburg by rail, trains only run in other directions, and even for them one must have a permit. All planes and cars are under control of the troops. So it will have to be the "underground railway" for me. For, when you drive a revolution underground it won't be long before there's an underground railway. It's quite easy even for a foreigner without local friends to get down the lifts and along the passages to it, provided he can find the way in. And a good place to look for the entrance is a newspaper office.

Wednesday Morning.—A back room in a beerhouse of a back street in Magdeburg. I am being booked through to Brunswick on the underground. The "tickets" are being made out among the slops and my guide is getting his instructions. For all tours on the underground are personally conducted.

Wednesday Evening.—A beerhouse in a back street of Brunswick. We have run the blockade successfully, and are waiting to be sent for by the revolutionary government. We reached Brunswick soon after dark, having travelled hard all day. First, leaving Magdeburg by train and going north, we got out at a wayside station where a carriage and pair was waiting. This drove us at a great pace over the rolling uplands to the outskirts of a village. Whom it belonged to I didn't hear, but it had the best pair of horses I saw in Germany. Next came a sharp run across country to a halt on a local steam tramway, which took us down to a junction where we got a train. The train had to be left unostentatiously en route. Fortunately, German trains don't go very fast nowadays; but standing on the end platform and waiting to jump while my Communist guide turned somersaults on the embankment, I should have preferred even my lop-winged Halle aeroplane to the Brunswick "underground." Another walk to a local station from which a train ran backwards and forwards to Brunswick. As we arrived it came up loaded with refugees who were retiring to country farms to escape the imminent invasion of the Prussian troops.

Wednesday Midnight.—Government House Brunswick.—The town is plunged in darkness but the Government building is all ablaze with lights and a-bustle with figures hurrying to and fro past the lighted windows. Inside there is a curious nightmare feeling of hampered haste and of imminent menace. Round a long table in an upper room sits a sort of council of war distractedly discussing whether Brunswick shall resist the Prussian troops that are due to arrive at dawn. In a sort of drawing-room adjoining, other members of the Independent Government sit about listlessly in fauteuils brought over from the palace, or pace restlessly about the room. A Communist is trying to spur the Council on to fight, assuring them that the soldiers and sailors are ready to face the tanks and trench mortars—which is true, and that the workmen will support them—which is not. A sailor suddenly appears in the Council room excitedly waving an object in his hand which it seems is a bomb that has just been found hidden in the cellars—but whether intended to blow up the revolutionaries or to be subsequently found by the reactionaries and exploited as an "atrocity" is not clear. Anyway, no one pays any attention to him, and annoyed at this he proceeds to take it to pieces to prove it's a real bomb. I persuade him to go away and drown it.

Soon after the Council decide not to fight. This definite decision wakes us all up from the nightmare. Telephone orders are at once sent out to the outposts, everyone hurries off on some mission, and as we go home the dark alleys are full of dim hastening groups hauling heavy objects—machine-guns and rifles to be thrown into the river or buried.

Thursday Morning.—A hotel window looking on the main square. I am taking down the history of revolutionary Brunswick from the dictation of one of the leading revolutionaries, while below the Prussian troops are marching in. The organisation of the Independent Government has made good in its last crisis and not a shot has been fired, to the openly expressed disappointment of the invaders. The hotel, awkwardly enough, has been commandeered as an auxiliary headquarters, and I have to escort my informant out past groups of officers and see him safely away into the "underground railway." He is one of the few wanted men who get clean away. Merges and others escaping in aeroplanes and in cars are with few exceptions caught. Merges himself, subsequently, is released by friendly jailers.

The burghers in the streets exult at their deliverance and some of the girls throw flowers to the troops. A young volunteer in an armoured car catches a bunch gracefully and I recognise him as a scion of the princely house of Reuss. At the back of the crowd stalwart men in ill-fitting civilian clothes glower gloomily. A girl at an attic window in a side street cries shrill abuse at the "steel helmets" and one boy in joke points his rifle at her. It goes off, the bullet stars the plaster and the boy looks as terrified as the girl. It is the only shot fired at the fall of the Free Republic of Brunswick.

Thursday Evening.—The General has deposed the Government of Independents and set up another of Majoritarians, has arrested all the leaders he can find and has proclaimed the severest form of martial law. Many burghers are already regretting the revolutionary régime. The streets are almost deserted for it is already dusk and no one may be out of doors after sundown. In the shadows under the overhanging gables of the mediæval market-place gleams the steel helm of a Prussian picket. Other cloaked and helmed figures gather round a fire down a side street. Brunswick is back in the Middle Ages and these might be Tilly's men. A fat burgher creeps cautiously past the hotel. Every evening for years he has trotted to the cosy beer cellar round the corner. Shall these bedamned Prussians keep a free Brunswicker from his beer. After several false starts he marches boldly out across the market. Bang goes a blank cartridge from the Prussian sentry and the burgher bolts back into obscurity. The liberty of Brunswick is no more.

The establishment of a Räte Republik at Munich got more attention than the Brunswick attempt but was really less interesting because less indigenous. The relative importance of the two was more accurately assessed at Berlin. Berlin has always had a difficulty in taking Munich politics seriously. It has had to recognise its superiority in Art and Literature, but compensates itself in matters political by an amused arrogance not unlike the attitude of London to Dublin. But Munich is not Bavaria. If it were, the Prussians and Wurtembergers would never have ventured to interfere; for the Bavarian is far too fierce a fighter and too jealous of his freedom for all the rest of Germany to coerce him as a nation. However, it soon became evident that Munich Communism represented only a section of the Munich workmen and was resented by Bavaria as a whole, with the exception of the proletariat in the large industrial towns. Even so, the Berlin Government acted cautiously. It was indeed in a difficult position; for the policy that Scheidemann's socialism stood for was one of compromise with political clericalism and provincial particularism. His minister, Preuss, then framing the constitution, had been reluctantly compelled to reject the conception of the more radical reformers who had hoped to found a wholly uniform and wholly united centralised German Socialist State. The Government had been forced to use the political jealousies of the German States and the clerical prejudices of the Centrum as weapons against the social revolution. It would not be too much to say of this period of German politics that only the revolutionary adherents of the Council movement were Germans; while the upper and middle classes had again become Prussians, Saxons or Bavarians. And now it had become necessary to coerce the capital of Bavaria, the centre of Roman Catholicism and the most sensitive and important of the minor kingdoms. And this, too, at the very time when everything was being done to induce German-Austria, Bavaria's neighbour, to accept the same sort of position in the Realm as that held by Bavaria. It was a most awkward predicament and the German Government showed less than its usual tactlessness in dealing with it. It arranged with the Bavarian bourgeois Government, when matters came to a crisis at Munich, that it should take refuge at Bamberg, where it could be protected by the Government's troops centred at Weimar. Then it arranged with Würtemberg and Baden to supply troops to restore this Bamberg ancien régime, supporting them with Saxons and, at first, keeping the Prussian corps in the background. Operations were then begun, first against the Franconian towns of North Bavaria, where Bavarian sentiment was weak. Any attempt against Munich was delayed until a raging Press propaganda against the rule of the Munich Bolshevists in the Wittelsbach Palais, and the crushing of the movement everywhere else, had excited the class feeling of the propertied farmers and burghers and had exorcised temporarily Bavarian jealousy of Prussia. All this, however, would not have ensured Berlin success, but for the inherent weakness of the Munich revolutionaries. The movement for Council Government and general Communism had lost all chance of success when it was forced either by the policy of its enemies or by the jealousies of its supporters into the hands of men like the Russian extremists, Leviné and Levien.

I saw a good deal of both men during my stay in Munich a few days before their fall, and both were very frank as to the hopelessness of their position. They were very different. Leviné was a black Jew of a common and rather criminal type, with a bad record, but great ability of a sort. Levien was a cosmopolitan and a Bohemian—in appearance and abilities a dissolute and demoralised version—a Bohemian and Bolshevist caricature—of the Treasury official who now represents us and rules Germany on the Reparation Commission.

A curious picture it was this Communist dictatorship in the Wittelsbach palace. Outside—crowds of workmen waiting for the posting of the bulletins in which decrees were proclaimed. Inside—a great coming and going of seedy-looking revolutionaries—a frantic clattering of typewriters pounded by unkempt girls—hurried conclaves in corners—remains of meals on marble tables—the dubious atmosphere of a Quartier Latin garret—the high pressure of a Bolshevist headquarters and the melancholy madness of a Wittelsbach pavilion.

The political situation in Bavaria after the revolution had rested entirely on the personal power of the idealist Jew, Kurt Eisner. His influence over both revolutionaries and reformers produced in Munich a coalition of Socialists in which the predominant element was progressive; whereas in Berlin, for want of any such personality the coalition split up into reactionaries and revolutionaries. The assassination of Eisner and the disablement of Auer on 21st February were succeeded by some weeks of the Hoffmann Government during which the issue as between parliamentary and council government was defining itself. The distribution of force at this time appears from a division in the Assembly of Councils where the proclamation of a Räte-Republik (a Council State) was outvoted by 230 to 70; Levien himself, the Bolshevist, declaring against it as premature. But during March the strong movement to the left and towards a Council constitution, noticeable in the Berlin Räte-Congress, made apparently even greater progress in the Bavarian industrial towns. Majority-Socialists, the Social-Democrats, found their followers going over en masse to the Independents, while the latter lost equally heavily to the Communists. In Prussia the Majoritarians had made up for this loss of popular support by creating a military force strong enough to resist any attempt to overthrow them by other than constitutional means. But in Bavaria the Majority party found itself being left in the air. It seems thereupon to have adopted a policy of outbidding its opponents. At Augsburg, late in March, Niekisch, a leading Majoritarian, declared for a Räte-Republik exclusive of Parliament, and succeeded in getting it voted. The vote was later rescinded under influence of the Independents and Communists, but restored under Majoritarian pressure. The same curious reversal of rôles followed in Munich, where a Majoritarian, Thomas, pressed for a Räte-Republik. A commission of Left Majoritarians and Right Independents was appointed on April 4th and adopted a programme including the dictatorship of the working class, the organisation of a council system on an industrial and professional basis, the socialisation of industries, banks, and land, the revolutionising of administrative, judicial, and educational systems, the separation of Church and State, compulsory work for all classes, the formation of a Red Army, and alliance with Hungary and Russia.

This programme was to be executed by a Central Council and Commissioners, equally composed of Independents, Communists, and Social-Democrats. At first the Communists refused to join and attacked the new Government bitterly as a humbug; but later, after proclamation of the Räte-Republik and a Council constitution, agreed to co-operate in the Central Council in an advisory capacity. The Räte-Republik was proclaimed on April 7th. The Hoffmann Government left; but soon after reappeared, first at Nuremberg and then at Bamberg, where it established itself as a sort of Bavarian Weimar. The Berlin Government at once refused recognition to the new régime, while it gave every countenance and support to the Bamberg Government.

A few days later, Sunday the 13th, a "putsch" under the leadership of a ci-devant, von Seifertitz, and a Majoritarian, Löwenfeld, supported by the Republican Schutztruppe, overthrew this Government and arrested the Independent members of the Central Council, as also Mühsam, a non-partisan idealist. The Communists then took immediate action and a hundred or so armed workmen under Toller, a young Independent officer, ejected as many soldiers from the railway station at the cost of two killed and a few wounded and some broken windows—a scuffle represented in Berlin as a desperate battle in which the station and surrounding houses had been completely destroyed. The Communists then formed a "Bolshevist" Government under Commissioners, among whom were included the Russians Levien and Leviné, and an Executive Council, on which were two Independents and a moderate, Maenner—an able man in charge of finance.

Of course in this curious chasser-croiser it is open to anyone to regard the Majoritarians as mere governmental agents provocateurs, working for a premature proclamation of the Räte-Republik, with such motives as it may suit the critic to attribute to them. This was the view taken by the Times; but personally I am inclined to see merely the manœuvring of demagogues ambitious of power, in a people with little political experience. To retain power, the Majoritarian Socialists of Prussia were prepared to re-introduce militarism; while those of Bavaria were prepared to introduce "Bolshevism" for the same object.

Both the course and the collapse of Munich Communism give an answer to the question whether Russian Bolshevism can take root in Germany. If Bolshevism meant Sovietism and merely is a constitutional conflict between parliamentary and council government, it could. There is no such traditional belief in the parliamentary system in Germany as to make it an essential foundation of constitutional government. Neither the old Berlin Reichstag nor the Weimar Assembly acquired popular confidence. But if by Bolshevism we mean an economic class conflict concerning the dictatorship of the proletariat, the answer seems to be that it cannot be established in Germany, under normal conditions.

The short life of the Munich Commune seemed to show this. The Government consisted of Commissioners—a sort of inner Cabinet, an Executive Council—a sort of Ministry, and an Assembly of Councils—the Legislature. The first was Bolshevist, in general standpoint, the second Independent Socialist and Moderate Communist, the third predominantly Moderate Socialist. The Commissioners, especially the Russians, did not enjoy the confidence of the Assembly, still less of the garrison. I believe that they would soon have been replaced by a Socialist régime, but for the military action of Prussia and Würtemberg.

Nor were the measures taken by this régime what could be called Bolshevist. The absurd newspaper yarns, reproducing all the old calumnies against Russian Council Government, including the communisation of women, gave quite a false impression. I have a complete list of the Communist measures, and they contain nothing very sensational and mostly existed anyway only on paper. I will give two examples which I heard discussed before the Assembly. The cafés chantants, a great feature of Munich, had all been closed on moral grounds, not without justification, as those who know Munich will admit. The delegates of the employés appealed against this as throwing three thousand people out of work. The debate showed that this measure was largely a protest of the workmen against the irregular lives of the Communist leaders themselves, and the cafés were allowed to re-open under the control of a committee of the Assembly. Further, the middle-class papers had been suspended by the Commissioners. So representatives of the Communist and Independent papers rose to say they would suspend publication until this prohibition was removed. This threat was carried out and at the time I left the prohibition was about to be repealed.

As to the practical results of the Bolshevist régime it was difficult to judge from the two or three weeks it was running; all the more that half this time was passed in the general strike proclaimed by the Communists which they could not prevent after their accession to power. But after work was resumed it was clear that conditions were normal. Order was not disturbed and the revolutionary tribunal as to which wild stories were told was a mild affair. It was even recognised by the local bar—and when an agent of the Anti-Bolshevist League was caught with false Communist papers and large funds he was only fined the amount in his possession. Telegraph officials, accomplices of a spy in running a secret telegraphic service to Nuremberg, were acquitted as only irresponsible agents. Russian Bolshevism would have given them a short shrift. The only practical difference between Communist Munich and Independent Brunswick was that the Munich revolutionaries not having the hearty support of the garrison had to form volunteer corps of Red Guards. These, like the Government volunteers, were highly paid and fed, the means being provided partly by money confiscated as illegal remittances abroad, partly by printing new notes. The extent of the attempted exportation of money may be guessed from the thousand mark note, the only convenient means of exportation, having been worth fourteen hundred marks. The removal of the note printing presses to Bamberg embarrassed the Communists for a time, but they had succeeded while I was there in printing twenty mark notes, which were, of course, declared worthless by the German Government.

At the time I left Munich the garrison had declared in favour of negotiating with the expeditions menacing Munich from Augsburg and Ingolstadt, and the workmen, though against negotiating with the troops, would clearly have welcomed a peaceful solution even at the cost of expelling the Russians. This I was able to report to the Premier Hoffmann at Bamberg, whom I found under the impression that negotiations were hopeless. Three days later, they were opened at his invitation at Nuremberg, but led to nothing, as the workmen would not agree to disarm. The troops accordingly marched in, driving the "red army" before them; and Munich, less happy in its leaders than Brunswick, became the scene of the usual sniping and skirmishing by insurgents with machine-gunning and bombarding by the troops. The influence of the Russians was probably responsible for one particularly ugly incident, the cold-blooded murder of a number of "hostages" in reprisal for the wholesale shooting of prisoners by the troops. Leviné, the leading member of the Russian clique, was captured and shot and several less dangerous and even quite harmless revolutionary or Radical leaders also perished, some "by accident." Levien was arrested some months later but escaped to Vienna. The new Bavarian Ministry, or rather the old Bamberg Government restored, then took on the same character as the Ministry in Berlin; that is a Government by military force behind a Moderate Socialist façade.

The failure of the revolution in Munich was its last effort in this first volume of the German revolution. The movement thereafter adopted Leipzig as its centre, an Independent stronghold; but when later the Government picked a quarrel with Leipzig, occupied it with troops and abolished its Independent régime, there was no resistance.

In this autumn of 1919 the German revolution seems hunted to death. It has, however, only gone to ground.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "Brunswick succeeded more thoroughly than any other German town in reaching the goal of the whole development of mediæval civic life—that is the emancipation and elevation of the working class....

"The Guilds developed unusually early in Brunswick those activities which rendered them everywhere schools of political education and centres of revolution. In Brunswick first of all did the workmen make head against the Burghers. And if old records can be trusted what immoderate ambitions appear even in their first rising in 1292. They were not merely in revolt against abuses or for some moderate participation in government, but proposed nothing less than the suppression of the old Constitution and to make themselves absolute masters of the town." Chroniken der Deutschen Städte. Braunschweig. Vol. I., p. xxvi.

CHAPTER IV[ToC]

RUIN AND RECONSTRUCTION

The mistake we are all making about Germany over here, and a very natural one, is that we can't realise what Germany to-day is like. While we are rapidly getting back to the material and mental conditions of pre-war days, Germany is daily getting farther and farther away from us. It is difficult to express the difference. We all know the curious psychological change that comes over our lives when the doctor tells us we must "give up"; how then in a moment, as we sink into bed, we are changed from responsible personalities, ruling our own and others' lives, to helpless encumbrances ruled by doctors and nurses; and how we only recover our rights through a long convalescence. Germany has given up. It carried on until it collapsed, and now lies semi-comatose; and we, still absorbed in our quarrel, keep pestering it with solicitors and foreclosures instead of patching it up with doctors and food. Descriptions of economic conditions in Germany must therefore be read with the realisation that they are morbid symptoms. Germany may be, no doubt is, working its way through revolution to a saner, sounder condition, but at present is as abnormal and helpless as a snake changing its skin. Meantime, we, using the complete control over Europe that the war has put into our hands, have so interfered with this process as to risk making out of Germany as great a danger to the existing order in Europe as we made out of Russia.

Nor is the danger one of to-day only. In ten years' time when the Blockade will be no more than a memory, but when the surviving childhood of Germany, bodily wasted and mentally warped, comes to maturity, Europe will suffer for it. The fathers will have eaten their sour grapes by then, but the children's teeth will still be set on edge.

"I do not complain of your blockade, it ended the war," said to me a former Minister and a leader of political thought. "Yes, I've lost four stone since I left the trenches"—he was indeed only the framework of a once big and burly man with the low voice and languid bearing of the underfed. "I'm all right on what I get, it's the children—I could give you statistics, but you wouldn't believe them; I never do. Go and see them yourself."

So I went. First a tour of the cellars of the great tenement houses of Berlin—cellars closed before as unfit for habitation, but now, under stress of house shortage, lived in by the large families of the German working class. In one I find a war widow keeping five children on the bare ration: 5 lb. of potatoes, 5 lb. of bread per head a week, ½ lb. of meal and 1 lb. of jam when they can afford it and find it. The bigger children get a quart of skim-milk a week, too sour for anything but soup—the younger about two quarts of full-milk. They are having their supper—cabbage and potatoes. The younger children nibble suspiciously at gifts of chocolate. They do not know what it is and suspect a new "substitute." The younger children look better than the elder. The eldest boy has lost his job because he "can't keep his feet." The mother is emaciated. Next door is another family—the father, a painter, is in work, but is continually losing days from "stomach-trouble." They have lost one child from decline.

And so on, always the same stories of struggle against decline from want of fats or sugar, for the sugar supply failed when the Poles occupied Posen—against dirt from want of soap—against dark and cold, for the gas and coal are getting daily shorter.

Then I went to a public soup kitchen where a long queue of every class was waiting for its plate of potato-soup, just potatoes, absolutely nothing else, and they too deducted from the week's ration. "Splendid, splendid soup," says an enthusiastic little man, a small shopkeeper, perhaps, "not a rotten potato in the whole plateful."

Thence to the crèches and children's hospitals of the organisation started by the Empress Frederick and run for many years by English ladies. In these big, bright rooms there was the same ominous quiet as in the dark cellars. "We can keep them alive when we get them in time, but we can't do more. We can fill them, but we can't feed them with this," said the sister, ladling out potatoes and cabbage to the older children and oatmeal gruel to the younger. Everywhere swollen bellies and shrunken limbs—children of three that had nothing actually wrong with them but couldn't yet stand—children with "English sickness" as rickets is called—children of school age that couldn't be sent to school because they were so mentally and physically backward. Here and there a sturdy infant that owed a better start to some stronger mother, but the most of them lying silent or wailing feebly. "We could save even that one," says the sister, unwrapping a baby so shrivelled it looked scarcely human, "but we can get nothing, though they give us here whatever there is. They know it's the children that matter most now."

Children have always meant much to the Germans, and in those days of growing disgust with the past and of growing despair as to the future they meant so much that nothing else seemed ever to matter to the women at any rate. I heard a woman prominent in politics say she was glad to hear that the Allies were going to occupy Essen, Düsseldorf and the industrial district, because then they must see what was happening to the children there, owing to the blockade and to the barring off of the milk supply from across the Rhine.

I soon saw enough to be satisfied that though food could still be got at a price in the eating houses of Berlin, private households of the whole working class and lower middle class were so straitened for food that some members of each family were being starved; either because they were too sickly to digest such food as could be got or because they were giving it to the children. The same conclusion was come to by the numerous Commissions sent out to report, even though these were generally composed of young officers; instead, as they should have been, of experienced medical men and food experts. These Commissions were given every facility for estimating how far under-nourishment had deteriorated the working power of the poor and was deterring them from work. Also how far the low development and high death-rate of the children was due to this. And their reports show what a terrible responsibility we assumed when we maintained the blockade after the armistice, as a means of political pressure and a method of penal procedure. These reports are easily accessible to English readers, so I will only give here, for what they are worth, the conclusions come to by one representative neutral and one native authority. A Copenhagen association for studying the economic results of the war, estimated that the German population, which at the beginning of the war was about 67.8 millions, would, but for the war, have risen by now to about 70 millions and had sunk to about 65 millions. Of this decrease 3.5 millions was due to diminished birth-rate and 2.1 millions to increased mortality. In the last years of war the birth-rate fell to one-half. Of the increased deaths, 700,000 were ascribable to insufficient nourishment, mainly in the last two years of war. In 1918 the death-rate for both sexes over 60 increased by half and doubled for children between 4 and 14. My observations also suggest that it was children of this age that suffered most from the blockade. The loss of about two millions of men in the prime of life, the decreased vitality of the women and children who suffered especially from the blockade, and the general economic conditions of the country, make any early re-establishment of previous productivity impossible.

Again, in the Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift one, Geheimrat Rübner, compares losses by war and blockade as follows:—

According to this estimate the blockade by the third year was causing almost as heavy losses as the war itself; and a calculation on this basis suggests that the continuance of the blockade after the armistice for six months, must have cost Germany at least 100,000 lives.

Presumably we intended the pressure of our blockade to ensure prompt acceptance of our peace conditions. If this was our policy, it was a dangerous mistake. A people, as docile and disciplined as the Germans, would have accepted any terms dictated them while still under the impression of their military defeat and of the moral derailment caused by the revolution. They would have welcomed our armies as allies in spite of the efforts to rally them made by Chauvinist or Bolshevist extremists. And nothing that a foreign State could have done was better calculated to make such efforts successful than the blockade and the boycott. Neither in Germany nor in Russia have we learnt that it is better to feed an idealist than to fight him. It is only those who fast who see visions.

The food scarcity from which Germany was suffering during the six months I spent there, was something between the food shortage from which we were then emerging and the famine we were imposing on Russia. Germans were not dropping dead in the streets as they were in Russia; but, on the other hand, Germans were not merely being restricted to a sufficient ration of simple food as were we in England. The German rations were insufficient both in quantity and quality. This was especially the case in the essential elements of nourishment; in bread-stuffs, fats, and sugar. Bread was particularly bad; and I realised as I never had before that if one cannot live by bread alone, bread alone is what one cannot live without. So rotten bad was the blockade bread that the staff of life became little better than a stab in the vitals. This punishment of the Prussian Prometheus should not be overlooked when we cast up the reckoning. But how can we realise it? I remember, the day after I got back from Germany, seeing a girl in a Berkshire village come out from a baker's shop with a large piece of white bread and give it to her donkey. Three days before I would have pulled her and her cart all round the town for that bread.

During my first weeks in Berlin I found that I was being continually reminded of the lines of the American poet:—

The window has a little pane,
And so have I.
The window's pane is in its sash,
I wonder why.

And after wondering why for some time I asked a doctor friend. "Oh," said he, "that's only the war bread. It will last some two months or so, and then you'll be all right again. If it goes on longer I'll give you a medical certificate for invalids' bread." But I could not face those two months. I used to bring bread back from Weimar, where it was better in quality, and after it went mouldy, boil it up into puddings. Travelling, I lived mainly off imported tins of oatmeal cooked in a stove of my own invention, for portable fuel such as petrol, spirits of wine, etc., was unprocurable. Here is the patent, which tourists on the Continent may find useful pending the permanent peace promised us by Paris. You take a small oblong biscuit tin and cut out one end. You stand your pot or a pan on the tin, roll up a newspaper, light it and shove the lighted end into the tin, stopping it from burning too fast with the tin lid. You can boil a kettle with a number of the Tag-Blatt, and the morning paper heats your porridge instead of, as usual, cooling it. I say nothing of the mental and moral advantages.

And if the bread was deleterious, the showy-looking biscuits and cakes that flaunted shamelessly in the shop windows were positively deadly. What they were made of German "substitute" experts alone know, but mainly, I should think, saccharine and sawdust.

While this state of affairs was mostly due to the blockade, statistics of German home cereal production before the war suggest that, with anything like the increase of home production that we brought about in England, there should have been enough to provide the population with wholesome bread. And Germany, both from its superior administrative organisation and from its far larger proportion of home-grown food, seemed likely to have done better than we did. But, both in total production and in production per acre there was a heavy fall, amounting to as much as about 50 per cent. in such important crops as rye and potatoes; while the slight recovery recorded in 1918 was due to a very favourable season.

And the reason for this collapse was loss of labour power in men and animals and of fertilisers, natural and artificial. Women in Germany do not play the large part in field work that many of us supposed. The greater proportion of the heavy work of cereal production was done by immigrant labour, and for that the prisoner labour seems to have been a very inadequate substitute. When this disappeared the effort to induce unemployed to go on the land was as complete a failure as might have been expected from our experience. To this loss of labour must be added the loss of agricultural land in the province of Posen, now occupied by the Poles, from which Berlin and the Saxon industrial districts drew their grain and potatoes. Thereafter the potato ration in Leipzig was for some time reduced from 5 lb. to 2 lb. weekly.

The importation of flour from America made at first little difference. It cost far too much and came to far too little. Meat was nearly always procurable at a price, and, if one knew where to go, was good enough. And for a hundred marks or so, equivalent to five pounds at the pre-war rate of money, quite a decent dinner could be got in select restaurants.[3]

The organisation of food supply was distinctly good. The conditions in Germany were indeed far more difficult than in England. Instead of having merely to control the importation at the main ports in Germany the supply had to be controlled before it left the hands of the individual farmer. This could, of course, only be done on broad lines. The system followed was to divide the country up into administrative areas corresponding to the local governments and roughly to apportion the supply of food products to the population. This resulted in certain areas becoming surplus and others deficit regions; and the surplus regions were then compelled to supply a certain proportion of their abundance to their less fortunate neighbours. But, of course, no control, however meticulous, could prevent rural districts from feeding full before anything went to the industrial districts, or could stop illicit trading between the well-to-do and the farmers. This "schleich-handel" or sneak trade kept the profiteer well supplied throughout the war with farm produce. After the revolution this profiteers' sneak trade was supplemented by a proletariat sneak trade, in which plundered stores were hawked through the poor quarters by broken soldiers and miscellaneous brigands. In Berlin, round the Alexanderplatz, there was perpetual skirmishing between these "wild traders" and the patrols of the Frei-Corps. The efforts to suppress the sneak trade of the well-to-do classes supporting the Government were not so drastic. Butter could generally be bought through the hotel waiters at forty marks a pound.

There was noticeable in all this a marked deficiency of public spirit in respect to private life. The German has for so long been drilled and dragooned in his public life that his civic conscience is little developed. Whereas in England one had the impression that the government and authorities, and especially the army, were the worst offenders against national economy and the mass of the middle class the most conscientious, in Germany it seemed quite the other way. Undoubtedly one of the irritants that excited the revolution was the failure of the rationing system to secure an equitable distribution—or anything more than a minimum of certain staple foods.

This food shortage is, of course, a cause as well as a consequence of the economic collapse of Germany. German economic life, swept away for years on the tide of war effort, now revolves round and round in a vicious circle like a dead carcase in an eddy after a flood. Famine and fighting have made the people too weak and too weary to work; but until they work they cannot get food from abroad or grow it at home. That is the economic vicious circle. The boycott and blockade have made the people too restless and revolutionary to reconstruct and remodel their constitutional institutions; and until they do so they are to be boycotted and embargoed. That is the political vicious circle in foreign affairs. In all regions of economic life one finds this endless chain of cause and effect revolving round Paris and fettering such energies as are left to Germany.

This is not the place for an estimate of the material sacrifices we have made and are making, so as to coerce Germany into accepting the peace conditions of Paris and into suppressing its own revolutionary movements. I would only point out that a brisk trade between France and Germany was proceeding all through these months of blockade. For example, an acquaintance in Switzerland who wanted in February a certain well-known make of French tyre was told by his garage that they could get them cheaper than in France if he did not mind where they came from. They came via Germany. And no sooner was the Treaty signed than a swarm of American agents descended on Berlin, buying up businesses right and left, as also such stocks as were left. Small wonder, with the mark at one-quarter its pre-war value. As to objets d'art and paintings, the ruin of the plutocracy and the low rate of exchange threaten to strip Germany far more effectively than any German raiders could strip the villas of France and Belgium. But in this legitimate indemnity we English have not benefited. We are too much afraid of "dumping," no doubt.

There are still probably many in England who fear that German competition will begin immediately with the raising of the blockade. Apart from the political and social conditions that make impossible an early convalescence of German industry from its complete collapse, the following official data taken from the preface to new regulations for the textile industry, show the conditions to which this industry was reduced before the revolution. This document it may be noted, is not one prepared for foreign consumption.

At the outbreak of war German industry had a stock of 300,000 bales of cotton on hand, and as much more was held by the Bremen merchants. And as much more again was imported up to the breach with Italy in May, 1915. The stock then was 600,000 bales. During the war 200,000 bales were seized in Belgium and Poland. This supply allowed the German mills an output of 4 per cent. to 5 per cent. of their annual peace output of about a million tons. The annual local wool production during the war was 7,000 tons, flax 20,000 tons, hemp 11,000 tons, artificial wool 25,000 tons, and artificial cotton from rags, etc., 33,000 tons.

Attempts to grow cotton substitutes were a failure. Nettle fibre in 1916 amounted to 200 tons, turf fibre 2,000 tons, reed fibre 1,000 tons. Artificial fabrics (stapel-fasser), on the other hand, rose to an annual amount of 10,000 tons, and seem to have a future. Paper thread rose to 150,000 tons annually, but is only a war expedient. The home production of fibre was about 2 per cent. of the previous importation.

These official figures show that the arrears now required are such that if they could be supplied they could not be paid for. A value of about five milliards is required as compared with a value of 1-½ milliards imported before the war, and 5 milliards is about the total value of all raw material imported annually before the war. The only prospect of supply otherwise is from home-made artificial fibres, and that only if they are protected against foreign cotton, which is absurd.

All the proposals now under discussion for improving methods of production by co-ordinating and controlling the factories even if feasible and effective will not, in the opinion of competent persons here, make up for any material proportion of the loss of productive power due to present conditions both of capital and labour. They wish to get this and other industries restarted, not with any prospect of profit, but to provide clothing and work for the industrial population.