THE WAR SLAVES OF ESSEN
Essen, the noisiest town in the world, bulks largely in the
imagination of the Entente Allies, but "Essen" is not merely one
city. It is a centre or capital of a whole group of arsenal towns.
Look at your map of Germany, and you will see how temptingly near
they are to the Dutch frontier. Look at the proximity of Holland
and Essen, and you will understand the Dutch fear of Germany. You
will grasp also the German fear, real as well as pretended, that
the battle of the Somme may one day be accompanied by a thrust at
the real heart of Germany, which, is Westphalia--Westphalia with
its coal and iron and millions of trained factory hands.
I saw when in Germany extracts from speeches by British politicians
in which the bombing of Essen by air was advocated. Perhaps the
task would have been easier if the bombing had come first and the
speeches afterwards. Forewarned, forearmed; and Essen is now very
much armed.
All German railroads seem to lead to this war monster. Attached to
almost every goods train in Germany you will see wagons marked
"Essen--special train." Wagons travel from the far ends of Austria
and into Switzerland, which is showing its strict neutrality by
making munitions for both sides.
On the occasion of my second visit to Essen during the war I
arrived at night. It was before the time of the bombing speeches,
and, though it was well into the hours when the world is asleep,
the sky glowed red with a glare that could be seen for full thirty
miles. My German companion glowed also, as he opened the carriage
window and bade me join him in a peep at what we were coming to.
"This is the place where we make the stuff to blow the world to
pieces," he proudly boasted. "If our enemies could only see that
the war would be over."
I suggested that Essen was not the only arsenal. There were, for
instance, Woolwich, Glasgow, Newcastle, Creusot, and in my own
strictly neutral country Bethlehem, Bridgeport, and one or two
other humble hamlets. He brushed aside my remarks, "But we have
also here is this very region Dortmund, Bochum, Witten, Duisburg,
Krefeld, Dusseldorf, Solingen, Elberfeld and Barmen."
As we approached nearer, freight trains, military trains and
passenger trains were everywhere. Officers and soldiers crowded
the station platforms, and though it was night the activity of
these Rhenish-Westphalian arsenal towns impressed me with the
belief that unless the British blockade can strictly exclude
essentials, such as copper and nickel, especially from their
roaring factories, the war will be needlessly protracted.
It is not necessary to be long in Rhineland and Westphalia to
realise that a shortage in these and other essentials is much more
disturbing to the heads of these wonderful organisations than the
fear of aerial bombs.
On the occasion of my first war-time visit to Essen it would have
been easy to have bombed it. There is an old saying that a
shoemaker's children are the worst shod, and the display of
anti-aircraft guns which has since manifested itself was then
non-existent. The town was ablaze. It is still ablaze, but the
lighting has been cunningly arranged to deceive nocturnal visitors,
and any aeroplanes approaching Essen at a height of twelve or
fifteen thousand feet would find it hard to discover which was
Essen, and which Borbeck, and which was Steele.
Mulheim is easily found, because it is close to the River Ruhr. We
had to halt a long time outside the station of Essen, so great was
the pressure of traffic. The cordon surrounding the entrance to
the city is some distance away, and having passed that safely I had
no fear of being again interrogated.
I told the hotel manager that I was a travelling newspaper
correspondent, and should like to see as many as possible, of the
wonders of his town. After praise of his hostelry, which, as the
sub-manager said, was too good for the Essenites, I set out on my
travels to see the sights of the city, foremost among them being
the regulation statue of William I.
It was easy to find Krupps, for I had only to turn my steps towards
the lurid panorama in the sky. As I came nearer, not only my sense
of sight but my sense of hearing told me that Germany's great
arsenal was throbbing with unwonted life. The crash and din of
mighty steam hammers and giant anvils, the flame and flash of
roaring blast furnaces, the rumbling of great railway trucks
trundling raw and finished products in and out, chimneys of dizzy
height belching forth monster coils of Cimmerian smoke, seem to
transport one from the prosaic valley of the Ruhr into the
deafening realm of Vulcan and Thor. The impression of Krupps by
night is ineffaceable. The very air exudes iron and energy. You
can almost imagine yourself in the midst of a thunderous artillery
duel. You are at any rate in no doubt that the myriad of hands at
work behind those carefully guarded walls are even more vital
factors in the war than the men in the firing line. The blaze and
roar fill one with the overpowering sense of the Kaiser's limitless
resources for war-making. For you must roll Sheffield and
Newcastle-on-Tyne and Barrow-in-Furness into one clanging whole to
visualise Essen-on-the-Ruhr.
In some way Essen is unlike any other town I have visited. It has
its own internal network of railways, running to and from the
various branches of Krupps, and as the trains pass across the
streets they naturally block the traffic for some minutes. They
are almost continuous and the pedestrians' progress is slow, but it
is exciting, for it is here that one realises what it means to be
at war with Germany. If the resolution of the German people were
as rigid as the steel in the great cranes and rolling mills, the
Allied task would be impossible.
The brief noon-tide rush of the workpeople resembles our six
o'clock rush in America towards Brooklyn Bridge. I can say no more
than that. There is nothing like it in London. The home-going
crowd round the Bank of England does not compare with the Essen
crowd, because the crowd at Essen is for a few minutes more
concentrated. Old and young, men and women, refugees and prisoners
of several nationalities (I saw no British), Poles and Russians
predominating, grimy, worn, and weary, they pour out in a solid
mass, and cover the tramcars like bees in swarming time. The
pedestrians gradually break up into little companies, most of them
going to Kronenberg and other model colonies founded by Frau
Krupp--"Bertha," as she is affectionately called throughout
Germany. The highest honour the Germans can bestow upon her is to
name their 16-inch howitzer "Fat Bertha." Frau Bertha Krupp, it
may be well to recall, was the heiress to the great Krupp fortune,
and on her marriage in 1906 to Herr von Bohlen und Halbach, a
diplomatist, he changed his name to Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach.
Though a private corporation with 12,500,000 pounds share capital
owned by the "Cannon Queen" and her family, it is to all intents
and purposes a Government Department just as Woolwich Arsenal is an
adjunct of the British War Office. In the past, as the elaborate
centenary (1910) memorial proudly recites, fifty-two Governments
throughout the world have bought Krupp guns, armour, shells, and
warships, with Germany by far the biggest customer.
Out of the stupendous profits of war machines the Krupps have built
workpeople's houses that, as regards material comfort, would not be
easy to excel. These houses are provided with ingenious
coal-saving stoves, that might well be copied elsewhere, for though
Essen is in the coal centre of Germany, they are just as careful
about coal as though it were imported from the other end of the
world.
Frau Bertha and her husband (a simple and modest man, who is, I was
informed, entirely in the hands of his specialists, and who has the
wisdom to let well alone) have put up a big fight with Batocki, the
food dictator. The semi-famine had not reached its height when I
was in Essen, and the suffering was not great there. A
munition-maker working in any of the Rhenish-Westphalian towns is
regarded by Germans as a soldier. As the war has proceeded he has
been subject to continuous combing out.
The amount of food allowed to those engaged in these great
factories and rolling mills is, I estimate, 33 per cent. more than
that allowed to the rest of the civil population. In all the
notices issued throughout Germany in regard to further food
restrictions, there is appended the line, "This change is necessary
owing to the need for fully supplying your brothers in the army and
the munition works."
Essen is a town that before the war had a population exceeding
300,000. A conservative estimate makes the figure to-day nearly
half a million. The Krupp Company employ about 120,000. A
prevalent illusion is that Krupps confine their war-time effort
exclusively to making war material. That is a mistake. A
considerable part of Krupp's work is the manufacture of articles
which can be exchanged for food and other products in neighbouring
countries, thus taking the place of gold. At Lubeck, I saw the
quays crowded with the products of Essen in the shape of steel
girders and other building machinery going to Sweden in exchange
for oil, lime from Gotland, iron ore, paper, wood, and food
products,
A mining engineer of the great mines at Kiruna, Lapland, told me
that he had just given an order for steam shovels from the
Westphalian manufacturers, who are also sending into Holland knives
and scissors and other cutlery and tools.
Germany's principal bargaining commodities with contiguous neutral
nations are steel building materials, coal, and dye-stuffs. Coal
dug in Belgium by Belgian miners is a distinct asset for Germany,
when she exchanges it for Swiss cattle, Dutch cheese, and Swedish
wood. When we consider that the great industrial combinations of
Rhineland and Westphalia are not only reaping enormous munition
profits, but supply the steel and coal which form the bulk of
German war-time exports, we can easily understand why some Social
Democrats grew dissatisfied because the all-powerful National
Liberals resisted a war profits tax for two years. It is
noteworthy that several of the more outspoken German editors have
been suspended for attacking these profiteers.
I should qualify this statement of exports slightly by saying that
they pertained up to November, 1916. The effort to put more than
ten million men into military uniform resulted not only in the
slave-raids in Belgium but in a concentration in munition output
that stopped further exports of steel products and coal on a large
scale.
We should always remember in this great war of machinery that
Germany secured a tremendous advantage at the expense of France at
the outset when she occupied the most important French iron region
of Longwy-Briey. The Germans, as I previously observed, have been
working the French mines to the utmost--indeed, they boast that
they have installed improved machinery in them. They have,
furthermore, been importing ore steadily from Sweden, some of the
Swedish ore, such as Dannemora, being the best in the world for the
manufacture of tool steel--so important in munition work.
Dusseldorf, probably the most attractive large manufacturing city
in the world, had planned an industrial exhibition for 1915 or
1916, and the steel skeletons of many of the buildings had already
been erected at the outbreak of war. But the Germans immediately
set to work to tear down the steel frames to use them for more
practical purposes. "We were going to call it a _German Fair_,"
said a native manufacturer to me early in the war; "but we can have
it later and call it a _World's Fair_, as the terms will be
synonymous."
Isolated near the Rhine is the immense reconstructed Zeppelin shed
which British airmen in November, 1914, partly destroyed, together
with the nearly completed Zeppelin within it. The daring exploit
evidently work up the newly appointed anti-aircraft gunners, for
they subsequently annihilated two of their own machines approaching
from the West.
The badly paid war slaves of Essen are working the whole
twenty-four hours, seven days a week, in three shifts a day of
eight hours each, under strict martial law. The town is a hotbed
of extreme Social Democracy, and as a rule the Socialists of
Westphalia are almost as red as those of the manufacturing
districts of Saxony. But Socialists though they be, they are just
as anti-British as the rest of Germany, and they like to send out
their products with the familiar hall-mark of "Gott strafe
England," or "Best wishes for King George." It is the kind of
Socialism that wants more money, more votes, less work, but has no
objection to plenty of war. It is a common-sense Socialism, which
knows that without war Essen might shrink to its pre-war dimensions.
Essen is very jealous of the great Skoda works near Pilsen in
Austria. My hotel manager spoke with some acerbity of the amount
of advertising the Austrian siege howitzers were receiving. "You
can accept my assurance," he said, "that the guns for the
bombardment of Dover were made here, and not at the Skoda works, as
the Austrians claim."
Every German in Essen seems to feel a personal pride in the
importance of the works to the Empire at the fateful hour. The
43-centimetre gun "which conquered Belgium"--as the native puts
it--is almost deified. Everybody struts about in the consciousness
that he or she has had directly or indirectly something to do with
the murderous weapon which has wrought such death and glory in
Germany's name. "The Empire has the men, Essen has the
armour-plate, the torpedoes, the shells, the guns. It is the
combination which must win." That is the spirit in Kruppville.