Germany remained the great problem of Europe and the great peril.
After the war, when “something seemed to break in them,” as a German
wrote to me, they were for a time stunned and dazed by defeat. To
German pride of race it seemed incredible, even in the face of dreadful
facts, that they had lost everything for which they had fought and
struggled with such desperate and stubborn will-power. After all their
victories! After all that slaughter! “_Deutschland über Alles!_” Now
they were in chains, hopeless and helpless, disarmed, under the heel of
France, Britain, Belgium—done and down!
The military chiefs hid themselves in their castles—sullen, broken.
They put all the blame on the German people. It was they who had
blundered and had been defeated. The invincible German armies had
never been defeated. Never! Only Ludendorff in an incautious book
confessed the truth that he had not been able to hold the line against
the overwhelming assault of the Allies. But his argument was the same.
It was German will-power that had broken behind the lines. It was
Bolshevism and Pacifism that had let down the fighting men. When the
Peace Treaties were published the German people gasped and, for a time,
despaired. They were confronted with conditions which would crush them
for all time. However hard they worked, all the profits of their labour
would be seized by their enemies. However much they pinched, more
would be demanded. There was no fixed sum which they could wipe out by
stupendous effort, but only sums rising higher in fantastic figures for
ever and ever. They were the bondslaves of the world.
That mood did not last, though it came back again. A new mood followed
and buoyed them up for a year or two. They had lost the War, but they
would show the world that they could win the peace. German genius,
organisation, and industry would rise above even the monstrous
penalties exacted by their enemies. They would capture the markets of
the world, smash all competitors by an industrial war, regain their
liberty and commercial power. The Krupp works which had made great guns
and all the monstrous machinery of war converted their plant to the
instruments of peace, produced ploughs, steam-engines, safety razors,
cash registers, everything that is made of metal for the use of life.
Every factory in Germany got to work again. There were no unemployed
as in England, because the workers accepted low wages, and desired
work almost as much as bread in a fever of industrial energy, to wipe
out the War and build up the prosperity of a peace. Defeat was better
than victory in its moral effect upon the German people. At least they
did not fall into that idleness, that craving for gaiety, that moral
lassitude and indiscipline of spirit which overcame the victorious
peoples. When I went to Germany, several times after the War, I was
amazed at its energy and industry. There were no scenes in Berlin like
those in London, with processions of unemployed and innumerable beggars
and crowds of loungers round the Labour Exchanges. There was an air of
activity in Germany, startling and rather splendid. The whole nation
was working full steam ahead, and the products of its industry were
being offered in the markets of the world at less than the cost price
of similar goods in England. It steadied them and gave them a purpose
in life.
And yet beneath this superficial appearance of renewed prosperity and
industrial power there was, as I could see, something rotten. Misery
was not to be seen in the open, as in London, but it was there, in
middle-class homes and mean streets. The whole of this new industrial
adventure in Germany was based upon underpaid and under-nourished
labour, upon cut-throat prices, and upon the temporary advantage of a
falling exchange.
The German Government was tinkering with its money, speeding up the
printing presses, issuing notes beyond the backing of real securities.
The illusion of a Germany capturing the world’s markets had no great
basis of truth. The world markets had lost their purchasing power,
however cheap were German goods. Russia was not buying much from
Germany, nor Austria, nor Poland, nor Hungary, nor Turkey. Looking
into the figures given me by experts—English as well as German—it
seemed certain that there was an adverse trade balance against Germany
when her national expenditure was reckoned with her revenue. The
reparations she was beginning to pay, the deliveries in kind she
was making to France, Belgium, and Italy, the costs of the Armies
of Occupation on the Rhine, were eating into her capital wealth and
swallowing up her last gold reserves. She had to pay her indemnities by
buying foreign money—dollars, sterling, francs—and after each payment
her own money depreciated by irresistible economic laws.