XXI

The coming of Peace, after four and a half years of a world in

conflict, was as great a strain to the civilized mind as the outbreak

of war. Indeed, I think it was more tragic in its effect upon the

mentality and moral character of the peoples who had been strained to

the uttermost.

The sudden relaxation left them limp, purposeless, and unstrung. A

sense of the ghastly futility of the horrible massacre in Europe

overwhelmed multitudes of men and women who had exerted the last

vibration of spiritual energy for the sake of victory, now that all

was over, and the cost was counted. The loss of the men they had loved

seemed light and tolerable to the soul while the struggle continued and

the spirit of sacrifice was still at fever heat, but in the coldness

which settled upon the world after that fever was spent, and in homes

which returned to normal ways of life, after the home-coming of the

Armies, the absence of the breadwinner or the unforgotten son, was felt

with a sharper and more dreadful anguish. A great sadness and spirit

of disillusion overwhelmed the nations which had been victorious, even

more than those defeated. What was this victory? What was its worth,

with such visible tracks of ruin and death in all nations exhausted by

the struggle?

As a journalist again, back to Fleet Street, in civil clothes, which

felt strange after khaki and Sam Brown belts, I found that my new

little assignment in life was to study the effects of the war which

I had helped to record, and to analyze the character and state of

European peoples, including my own, as they had been changed by that

tremendous upheaval.

Fleet Street itself had changed during the war. In spite of the

severity of the censorship under the Defense of the Realm Act, and the

almost slavish obedience of the press to its dictates, the newspaper

proprietors had risen in social rank and power, and newspaper offices

which had once been the shabby tenements of social outcasts--the

inhabitants of “Grub Street”--were now strewn with coronets and the

insignia of nobility. Fleet Street had not only become respectable. It

had become the highway to the House of Lords.

The Harmsworth family had become ennobled to all but the highest grade

in the peerage, this side of Dukedom. As chief propagandist, the man I

had first met as Sir Alfred Harmsworth (when General Booth forced me to

my knees and prayed for him!) was now Viscount, with his brother Harold

as Lord Rothermere. He aspired to the dictatorship of England through

the power of the press, and, but for one slight miscalculation, would

have been dictator.

That miscalculation was the growing disbelief of the British public in

anything they read in the press. The false accounts of air raids (when

the public knew the truth of their own losses), such incidents as the

press campaign against Kitchener, and that ridiculous over-optimism,

the wildly false assurances of military writers (I was not one of them)

when things were going worst in the war, had undermined the faith of

the nation in the honesty of their newspapers. Nevertheless, the power

of men like Northcliffe was enormous in the political sphere, and

Cabinet Ministers and members of Parliament acknowledged their claims.

Burnham of _The Telegraph_ was now a Viscount, but, unlike Lord

Northcliffe, he supported whatever government was in power and had no

personal vendetta against politicians or policies.

Max Aitken, once a company promoter in Canada, and now proprietor of

_The Daily Express_, became Lord Beaverbrook as his reward for the part

he played in unseating Asquith and bringing in Lloyd George. Another

peer was Lord Riddell, owner of the “News of the World,” which is not

generally regarded as a spiritual light in the land. As one of the most

intimate friends of Lloyd George, he merited the reward of loyalty. Not

only peerages, but baronetcies and knighthoods were scattered in Fleet

Street and its tributaries by a Prime Minister who understood the power

of the press, but, in spite of a free distribution of titles, did not

possess its loyalty when the tide of public favor turned from him.

The five war correspondents on the Western front--Perry Robinson,

Beach Thomas, Percival Phillips, Herbert Russell, and myself--received

knighthood from the King, at the recommendation of the War Office.

I had been offered that honor before the war came to an end, but it

was opposed by some of the newspaper proprietors who said that if

I were knighted the other men ought also to receive this title--a

perfectly fair protest. I was not covetous of that knighthood, and

indeed shrank from it so much that I entered into a compact with Beach

Thomas to refuse it. But things had gone too far, and we could not

reject the title with any decency. So one fine morning, when a military

investiture was in progress, I went up to Buckingham Palace, knelt

before the King in the courtyard there, with a top hat in my hand,

and my knee getting cramped on a velvet cushion, while he gave me the

accolade, put the insignia of the K.B.E. round my neck, fastened a star

over my left side, and spoke a few generous words. I should be wholly

insincere if I pretended that at that moment I did not feel the stir

of the old romantic sentiment with which I had been steeped as a boy,

and a sense of pride that I had “won my spurs” in service for England’s

sake. Yet, as I walked home with my box of trinkets and that King’s

touch on my shoulder, I thought of the youth who had served England

with greater gallantry, through hardship and suffering to sudden death

or to the inevitable forgetfulness of a poverty-stricken peace.

That knighthood of mine deeply offended one of my friends, whose good

opinion I valued more than that of most others. This man, who had

been in the ugly places with me, could hardly pardon this acceptance

of a title which seemed to him a betrayal of democratic faith and

an allegiance to those whom he regarded as part authors of the war,

traitors to the men who died, perpetrators of hate, architects of

an infamous peace, and profiteers of their nation’s ruin. A harsh

judgment! The only difference I find that knighthood has made to my

outlook on life is the knowledge of a slight increase in my tradesmen’s

bills.

One change in the editorial side of Fleet Street affected me in a

personal way, and was a revelation of the anxiety of the Coalition

Government to capture the press in its own interests. Robert Donald,

under whose Directorship I had served on _The Daily Chronicle_ for

many years--with occasional lapses as a free lance--had been a

close personal friend of Lloyd George, but toward the end of the

war permitted himself some liberty of criticism--very mild in its

character--against the Prime Minister. It was his undoing. Lloyd George

was already under the fire of the Northcliffe press which had helped to

raise him to the Premiership and now tired of him, for personal reasons

by Lord Northcliffe, and he foresaw the time when, after the war, he

would need all the support he could get from the press machine. A group

of his friends, including Sir Henry Dalziel (afterward promoted to the

peerage) and Sir Charles Sykes, a rich manufacturer, approached the

Lloyds, who owned _The Daily Chronicle_, and bought that paper and

Lloyds _Weekly News_ for over £1,000,000. Robert Donald found it sold

over his head, without warning, and felt himself obliged to resign his

editorship. Ernest Perris, the former news editor, who had managed that

department with remarkable ability, reigned in his stead, and _The

Daily Chronicle_ became the official organ, the defender through thick

and thin, fair and foul, of Lloyd George and his Coalition.

A series of dramatic telegrams reached me at the front, but I paid very

little heed to them and failed to understand the inner significance

of this affair. But in loyalty to Robert Donald, and by his advice, I

signed a contract with _The Daily Telegraph_. It made no difference

to my readers, as my articles continued to appear in _The Daily

Chronicle_, as well as in _The Telegraph_, as they had done throughout

the war, by arrangement of the Newspaper Proprietors Association and

the War Office.

Nominally Lord Burnham was my chief instead of Robert Donald. I

liked him thoroughly, as he had always been particularly kind to me,

especially on a night when I was deeply humiliated by one of those

social _faux pas_ which hurt a man more than the guilty knowledge of a

secret crime.

This was during the war, when I arrived home on leave to find a card

inviting me to dine with Lord Burnham at the Garrick Club. I had

often dined at the Garrick with my brother, who was a member of the

club, and remembered that evening clothes had not been worn by most

of the men there. Anyhow, I arrived from a country journey in an

ordinary lounge suit, with rather muddy boots, owing to a downpour of

rain, and then found, to my consternation, that I was the guest of a

distinguished dinner party assembled in my honor. The first man to whom

I was presented was Field Marshal Sir William Robertson, Chief of the

Imperial Staff, and behind him stood Admiral Lord Charles Beresford

(old “Charlie B.”) and a number of important people who were helping to

“win the war.” Lord Burnham entirely disregarded my miserable clothes,

but I was damnably uncomfortable until I forgot my own insignificance

in listening to the conversation of these great people who were as

gloomy and pessimistic a crowd as I have ever met, and seemed to have

abandoned all hope. The one exception was Sir William Robertson, who

sat rather silent until at the end of the meal he said “We may be

puffed, and breathing hard, but all I can say is, gentlemen, that the

Germans are more exhausted.”

That reminiscence, however, only leads me to the fact that after the

Armistice I again transferred to _The Daily Chronicle_ and remained

with them until Lloyd George’s policy of reprisals in Ireland filled

me with a sudden passion of disgust and led to my resignation from the

paper which supported it.

I think every journalist must now admit that the English press, with

very few exceptions, fell to a very low moral ebb after the Armistice.

The “hate” campaign was not relinquished but revived with full blast

against the beaten enemy. A mountain of false illusion was built up on

the basis that Germany could be made to pay for all the costs of war in

all the victorious nations, and a peace of vengeance was encouraged,

full of the seeds of future wars, at a time in the history of mankind

when by a little spirit of generosity, a little drawing together of

the world’s democracies, even a little economic sanity in regard to

the ruined state of Europe as a whole, civilization itself might have

been lifted to a higher plane, future peace might have been secured

according to the promise of “the war to end war,” and at least we

should have been spared the squalor, the degradation, the bitterness

of the last four years. But the English press led the chorus of

“Hang the Kaiser,” “Make the Germans pay,” “They will cheat you yet,

those Junkers!” and all the old cries of passionate folly, instead of

concentrating on the defeat of militarism now that Germany was down and

out, the economic reconstruction of Europe after the ruin of war, and

the fulfilment of the pledges that had been made to the men who won the

war. For, as we now know, and as I foretold, the German people could

not pay these colossal, unimaginable sums upon which France and Great

Britain reckoned, and the whole argument of these “fruits of victory”

was built upon a falsity which demoralized the peoples of the allied

Powers, and kept Europe in a ferment. The English press (apart from a

few papers) refused to bear witness to the real truth, which was that

the Peace of Versailles was impossible of fulfillment, that Europe

could not recover under its economic provisions, and that the victor

nations would have to face poverty, an immense burden of taxation, a

stagnation of trade, the awful costs of war, with no chance of getting

rich again by putting a stranglehold on the defeated peoples.

For four years following the Armistice I become a wanderer in Europe,

Asia Minor, and America, as a student of the psychology and state of

this after-war world, trying to see beneath the surface of social

and political life to the deeper currents of thought and emotion and

natural law set in motion by the enormous tragedy through which so many

nations had passed.

Everywhere I saw a loosening of the old restraints of mental and moral

discipline and a kind of neurotic malady which was manifested by

alternate gusts of gayety and depression, a wild licentiousness in the

crowded cities of Europe, a spirit of restlessness and revolt among the

demobilized men, and misery, starvation, disease, and despair, beyond

the glare and glitter of dancing halls, restaurants, and places of

frivolity.

In France the exultation of victory, which inspired a spirit of

carnival in the boulevards of Paris, crowded with visitors from all

the Allied nations, did not uplift the hearts of masses of peasants

and humble bourgeois folk who returned to the sites of their old homes

and villages of which only a few stones or sticks or rubbish heaps

remained in the fields which had been swept by the flame of war.

With courage and resignation they cleared the ground of barbed wire

and unexploded shells, and the unburied bodies of men, and the foul

litter of a four years’ battle, but they faced a bleak prospect, and

behind them and around them was the vision of ruin and death. For a

long time they were without water or light, stone or timber, for the

work of reconstruction, or any recompense for their losses from the

French Government which looked to Germany for reparations and did not

get them. I talked with many of these people in their hovels and huts,

marveled at their patience and courage and was saddened because so

quickly after war they mistrusted the friendship of England, and the

security of the peace they had gained. Their hatred to the Germans was

a cold, undying fire, and beneath their hatred was the fear, already

visible, that Germany hadn’t been smashed enough, and that one day she

would come back again for vengeance.

In Italy there was violence, bitterness, poverty, and revolt. The

nation was demoralized by all the shocks that had shaken it. The

microbe of Bolshevism was working in the brains of demoralized

soldiers. The very walls of Rome were scrawled with Communistic cries

and the name of Lenin.

In Rome I accomplished a journalistic mission which, in its way, was a

unique honor and experience. This was to interview the Pope on behalf

of _The Daily Chronicle_ and a syndicate of American newspapers. Such a

thing seemed impossible, and I knew that the chances against me were a

million to one. Yet I believed that some plain words from the Pope who,

perhaps, alone among men had been above and outside all the fratricidal

strife of nations, and had been abused by both sides as “Pro-German”

and “Pro-Ally,” would be of profound interest and importance. It was

possible that he might give a spiritual call to humanity in this time

of moral depression and degradation. I pressed these views upon a

certain prelate who had the confidence of Benedict XV, and who was a

broad-minded man in sympathy with democratic thought and customs.

He laughed at me heartily for my audacity, and said, “Out of the

question!... Impossible!” He explained that no journalists were

allowed even at the public audiences of the Pope, owing to regrettable

incidents, and that my request for a private interview couldn’t be

considered.... We talked of international affairs, and presently I took

my leave. “It is no use pressing for that interview?” I asked at the

door. He laughed again, and said, “I will let you have a formal reply.”

Three days later, to my immense surprise, I received, without any other

word, a card admitting me to a private interview with H. H. Benedict

XV, at three-thirty on the following afternoon.

I knew that I had to wear evening clothes, and on that hot afternoon

I entirely wrecked three white ties in the endeavor to make a decent

bow, and then borrowed one from a waiter. Hiring an old _carrozza_, and

feeling intensely nervous at the impending interview, I drove to the

Vatican. My card was a magic talisman. The Swiss Guards grounded their

pikes before me, and their officer bowed toward a flight of marble

steps leading to the private apartments. I was passed on from room

to room, saluted by gentlemen of the Pope’s bodyguard in impressive

uniforms, until my knees weakened above the polished boards, my tongue

clave to the roof of my mouth, and my waiter’s dress tie slipped up

behind my right ear.

Finally, in a highly self-conscious state, I reached an ante-chamber

where I was kept waiting for ten minutes until a chamberlain came

through a little door and beckoned to me. As I passed through the

doorway, I saw a tiny little man in white robes, waiting for me on the

threshold.

He smiled through his spectacles, took hold of my wrist as I went down

on one knee, according to etiquette, hauled me up with a firm grip, and

led me to two gilt chairs, side by side. “Now we can talk,” he said in

French, and he sat in one chair and I in the other, in that big room

where we were alone together.

In a second my nervousness left me, and we had what the Americans

call a heart-to-heart talk. The Pope did not use any fine phrases. He

asked me a lot of questions about the state of Europe, the feeling in

England and America, and then spoke about the war and its effects.

Several times he called the war “a Scourge of God,” and spoke of his

efforts to mitigate its misery and relieve some of its agonies. He

alluded to the abuse he had received from both sides because of his

neutrality and his repeated efforts on behalf of peace, and then waved

that on one side and entered into a discussion on the economic effects

of war. He saw no quick way of escape from ruin, no rapid means of

recovery. “We must steel ourselves to poverty,” he said, and alluded to

the great illusion of masses of people, duped by their leaders, that,

after the destruction of the world’s wealth, there could be the same

prosperity. He spoke sternly of the profiteers, and in a pitying way

of the poverty-stricken peoples. “The rich must pay,” he said. “Those

who profited out of the war must pay most.” His last words, after a

twenty-minutes’ talk, were a plea for charity and peace in the hearts

of peoples.

All the time he was talking, I had in the back of my mind the doubt

whether I might publish this conversation, and whether, indeed, he

knew my profession and purpose. I could not leave him with that doubt,

and asked him, with some trepidation, if I might publish the words

he had spoken to me. He smiled, and said, “It is the purpose of this

conversation.”

I hurried back to my hotel, and wrote a full account, and then desired

to submit it for approval to the prelate who had obtained this great

consent. But he waved it on one side, and said, “You can write what you

like, and publish what you like, provided it is the truth. We trust

you!”

I did not abuse that trust, and my interview with the Pope was quoted

in every newspaper in the English-speaking world, and created a very

favorable effect.

The raid on Fiume by d’Annunzio was a passionate assertion of Imperial

claims denied by the Great Powers which have made a peace regarded

by Italy as a robbery of all its rightful claims, but this new

manifestation of militarism was offset by the capture of factories by

Communist workers and the hoisting of the Red Flag in many industrial

towns. Beneath the beauty of Rome, Florence, Naples, and Venice, I saw

the ugly shadow of revolution and anarchy.

I went from Trieste to Vienna, and saw worse things in a city

deliberately doomed by the Allied Powers--a city of two million people

which had once been the capital of a great Empire, the brilliant

flower of an old civilization, and now was cut off from all its old

resources of wealth and life. In slum streets and babies’ crêches, and

hospital wards, away from the wild vice and gayety of great hotels

and dancing halls crowded with foreigners and profiteers, I saw the

children of a starving city, stricken with rickets, scrofula, all

kinds of hunger-diseases, and so weak that children of six or seven

had no hardness of bone, so that they couldn’t stand up or sit up,

and had bulbous heads above their wizened bodies. The women could not

feed their babes for lack of milk. Men like skeletons in rags slouched

about the streets, begging with clawlike hands. Ladies of good family

could not buy underclothing or boots. Professional men, aristocrats,

Ministers of State, lived on thin soup, potatoes, war bread, and the

very nurses in the hospitals were starving. The Austrian kronen became

worth hardly more than waste paper, and despair had settled upon this

great and beautiful city.

I went on to Germany, deeply curious to know what had happened in the

soul and state of this people after their tremendous struggle and their

supreme defeat. I found there an immense pride of resistance to the

consequence of defeat, an utter repudiation of war guilt, an intense

vital energy and industry by which they hoped to recapture their lost

trade and economic supremacy in Europe, a friendly feeling toward

England, a deadly hatred toward France. Outwardly there was no sign

of poverty or despair. There were no devastated regions, like those

in France, no tidal wave of unemployment, like that in England. All

the great engineering works, like those of Krupp which had provided a

vast output of artillery and munitions for a world war, had adapted

their machinery to the purposes of peace, and were manufacturing

railway engines, agricultural machines, typewriters, kitchen utensils,

everything that is made of metal, for the world’s needs. It was

staggering in its contrast to the lack of energy, the commercial

stagnation, the idleness and debility of other war-tired peoples.

But, again, I tried to see below the surface of things, and I saw

that this feverish activity was not based on sound foundations of

material life, but on a rotten financial system and unhealthy laws.

The workingman was underpaid and underfed, and the victim of a system

of slave labor. The professional classes were in dire poverty, and

what money they earned and saved lost its value day by day, because the

German Government was deliberately inflating its paper money by racing

the printing presses with issues of false notes which had no reality to

back them. German export trade was capturing the world’s markets, but

only by underselling to a rate which gave no real industrial profit.

And whatever wealth Germany made, or could make, was earmarked for

reparations and indemnities which, when the day of reckoning came,

would make a mockery of all her efforts, reveal the great sham of her

paper money, cast her into the depths of ruin, and mock at the demands

of France and her Allies for the payment of those debts of war upon

which they counted for their own needs and escape from ruin.

In Germany I had long talks with some of their leading politicians,

bankers, and financial experts, whose figures and statements I checked

by consultation with our own Ambassador and political observers. It

was not without a thrill of cold emotion, and dark remembrance, that

I stood for the first time in the Reichstag and saw all around me

those men who had been the propagandists of hate against England, the

supporters of the War Lords, the faithful servants of the Kaiser and

his Chancellors, up to the last throw in their gamblers’ game with

fate, when all was lost. There was Scheidemann, the Social Democrat

who had voted for all the war subsidies until the hour of defeat,

when he voted for the new Republic. There was Stresemann, the leader

of the People’s Party, and an avowed Monarchist, in spite of all that

had happened. There was Bernsdorff, the intriguer in America, up to

his neck in conspiracy with dynamiters and Sinn Feiners and spies.

These men filled me with distrust. Their new profession of good will

to England had a hollow sound. Yet these, and others, spoke with the

utmost frankness about Germany’s condition, and for their own reasons

did not hide the desperate menace of that gamble with national finance

by which they hoped to postpone the inevitable crash. I was more deeply

interested in the mentality of the ordinary German folk and their

way of life. A strain of pacifism seemed to be working among them,

and they were sick and saddened by their loss of blood in the war,

terrible in its sum of death. But the very name of France inflamed

their passion. “We are all pacifists,” said one man I met. “We want

no more war--except one!” The humiliation of the French occupation on

the Rhine, the continued insults of the French press, above all, the

presence of Moroccan troops in German cities, instilled a slow poison

of hate into every German mind. It made me afraid of the future....