I am the Neutral Journalist who wanders round Europe. I am absolutely
impartial. I am absolutely trustworthy. My perfect integrity is vouched
for at the head of all my articles. Pleasant it is to come over to
London, sell one set of articles to the Boom Press and another to the
Gloom Press, and then sit down with smiling face and begin an article
for Germany: "I sit in a hovel amongst the ruins of Fleet Street, with
the wreck of the armoured fort of St. Paul's in view. I hear a stir
outside. A wild mob of conscientious objectors is beating a recruiting
officer to death. Such things happen hourly in defeated Albion." My
series of London, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham--all in
ashes--has proved so successful that I propose to cover all the large
towns and construct a Baedeker of ruins.
Yet I pride myself more on my work for England's Press. My German
articles have all to be in the same vein. Only the Boom Press exists in
Germany. But in England one can vary one's view and do artistic work.
You must have read my story of the struggle for the last sausage in a
Frankfort butcher's shop--how the troops intervened and the crowd
attacked them, and how ultimately 1,400 civilians were mown down with
machine guns--and the sausage was eaten by the General Officer
commanding the Army Corps that suppressed the rising. You must also have
seen my description of the KAISER--his white hair, bent shoulders,
deathlike look as he passed, protected by his Guards from the wild fury
of the Berlin mob. Of course I have another KAISER, the bright smiling
man whose youth seems to have been renewed by the War, who waves his
hand to the madly enthusiastic crowds waiting round the Palace for a
glimpse of their divinity.
You must have read my secret interviews with distinguished Germans, who
whispered to me that HINDENBURG had thrown down his sword and declared
that if the useless slaughter did not cease he would march on Berlin. I
have told you their promises of bloody revolutions and fierce risings.
Also I have given you interviews with other distinguished Germans, who
confided to me that now Germany could turn out one submarine and one
Zeppelin every week-day and two on Sundays, and I have thrilled you with
the details of the great trade war which will come directly peace is
declared, when Germany will win back all her wealth by selling
everything fifty per cent. below cost.
How my dinners vary in that strange Teutonic land! I pay twenty marks
for two tiny slices of fish, a thin piece of indigestible potato bread,
and a section of rancid sausage. At other times I spend two marks and
get a delightful meal which could not be procured in a London restaurant
for five shillings. I walk through Berlin and see scarcely a cripple or
a wounded man. I let you know that ninety-five per cent. of German
wounded, owing to the skill of German doctors, go back to the Front in a
week. To other English readers I confide that all the maimed, wounded
and blind are sent into the very centre of Germany. There are huge
districts without a whole man in them.
Did you ask for the actual facts? I will give you one--and it is this:
the only persons in Germany whose waist-measurements have increased in
the War are the neutral journalists.
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