In Germany it was not so bad—but bad. For the last year of the war the
people had been reduced to the bare limits of food supply. After the
war, when the blockade was maintained until the signature of peace, the
children went without milk and fats and there was general shortness
of provisions, not amounting to actual starvation, but weakening the
working men and women. Factory workmen told me that they never ate
meat, and existed on bread and potatoes. It was enough for life, they
said, but not enough for physical strength. They felt tired. Women
fainted in the tramcars. There was stinting and scraping in every home,
except those of the “profiteers,” who by some genius of finance were
making a good thing out of the fall of the mark.
Coming across Europe like that, and seeing the spreading track of
financial and commercial ruin, the lowering of the standard of life
in many countries where it had been high and splendid, the loss of
purchasing power for anything but the barest necessities, and all the
new frontiers and customs lines between new States and old States,
checking the free interchange of goods, slowing down world trade,
an observer like myself was staggered by the gravity of this state
of things. It seemed to me that we were all heading for disaster.
I was convinced that all those fair promises of quick prosperity,
German reparations, revival of British trade, stabilising of
international exchanges, would be utterly falsified unless there was
a new co-operation among the countries of Europe on lines of economic
commonsense, and a truce to the policy of demanding from the defeated
countries immense sums of money beyond their ability to pay. It seemed
to me very clear that if Germany went down into real economic disaster
the whole of Europe would go down too, and that what was wanted most
was not payment of fantastic reparations but a return to the normal
exchange of goods and energy. I was afraid for England.