reached in France in the year 1919. Not only luxuries and comforts, but
some of life's necessaries, were beyond the reach of home-coming
soldiers, and this was currently ascribed to the greed of merchants, the
disorganization of transports, the strikes of workmen, and the
supineness of the authorities, whose main care was to keep the nation
tranquil by suppressing one kind of news, spreading another, and giving
way to demands which could no longer be denied. There was another and
more effectual cause: the war had deprived the world of twelve million
workmen and a thousand milliard francs' worth of goods. But of this
people took no account. The demobilized soldiers who for years had been
well fed and relieved of solicitude for the morrow returned home,
flushed with victory, proud of the commanding position which they had
won in the state, and eager to reap the rewards of their sacrifices. But
they were bitterly disillusioned. They expected a country fit for heroes
to live in, and what awaited them was a condition of things to which
only a defeated people could be asked to resign itself. The food to
which the poilu had, for nearly five years, been accustomed at the front
was become, since the armistice, the exclusive monopoly of the
capitalist or the _nouveau-riche_ in the rear. To obtain a ration of
sugar he or his wife had to stand in a long queue for hours, perhaps go
away empty-handed and return on the following morning. When his
sugar-card was eventually handed to him he had again to stand in line
outside the grocer's door and, when his turn came to enter it, was
frequently told that the supply was exhausted and would not be
replenished for a week or longer. Yet his newspaper informed him that
there was plenty of colonial sugar, ready for shipment, but forbidden by
the authorities to be imported into France. I met many poor people from
the provinces and some resident in Paris who for four years had not once
eaten a morsel of sugar, although the well-to-do were always amply
supplied. In many places even bread was lacking, while biscuits,
shortbread, and fancy cakes, available at exorbitant prices, were
exhibited in the shop windows. Tokens of unbridled luxury and glaring
evidences of wanton waste were flaunted daily and hourly in the faces of
the humbled men who had saved the nation and wanted the nation to
realize the fact. Lucullan banquets, opulent lunches, all-night dances,
high revels of an exotic character testified to the peculiar psychic
temper as well as to the material prosperity of the passive elements of
the community and stung the poilus to the quick. "But what justice,"
these asked, "can the living hope for, when the glorious dead are so
soon forgotten?" For one ghastly detail remains to complete a picture to
which Boccaccio could hardly have done justice. "While all this wild
dissipation was going on among the moneyed class in the capital the
corpses of many gallant soldiers lay unburied and uncovered on the
shell-plowed fields of battle near Rheims, on the road to
Neuville-sur-Margival and other places--sights pointed out to visitors
to tickle their interest in the grim spectacle of war. In vain
individuals expostulated and the press protested. As recently as May
persons known to me--my English secretary was one--looked with the
fascination of horror on the bodies of men who, when they breathed, were
heroes. They lay there where they had fallen and agonized, and now, in
the heat of the May sun, were moldering in dust away--a couple of hours'
motor drive from Paris...."[17]
The soldiers mused and brooded. Since the war began they had undergone a
great psychic transformation. Stationed at the very center of a
sustained fiery crisis, they lost their feeling of acquiescence in the
established order and in the place of their own class therein. In the
sight of death they had been stirred to their depths and volcanic fires
were found burning there. Resignation had thereupon made way for a
rebellious mood and rebellion found sustenance everywhere. The poilu
demobilized retained his military spirit, nay, he carried about with him
the very atmosphere of the trenches. He had rid himself of the sentiment
of fear and the faculty of reverence went with it. His outlook on the
world had changed completely and his inner sense reversed the social
order which he beheld, as the eye reverses the object it apprehends.
Respect for persons and institutions survived in relatively few
instances the sacredness of life and the fear of death. He was
impressed, too, with the all-importance of his class, which he had
learned during the war to look upon as the Atlas on whose shoulders rest
the Republic and its empire overseas. He had saved the state in war and
he remained in peace-time its principal mainstay. With his value as
measured by these priceless services he compared the low estimate put
upon him by those who continued to identify themselves with the
state--the over-fed, lazy, self-seeking money-getters who reserved to
themselves the fruits of his toil.
One can well imagine--I have actually heard--the poilus putting their
case somewhat as follows: "So long as we filled the gap between the
death-dealing Teutons and our privileged compatriots we were well fed,
warmly clad, made much of. During the war we were raised to the rank of
pillars of the state, saviors of the nation, arbiters of the world's
destinies. So long as we faced the enemy's guns nothing was too good for
us. We had meat, white bread, eggs, wine, sugar in plenty. But, now that
we have accomplished our task, we have fallen from our high estate and
are expected to become pariahs anew. We are to work on for the old gang
and the class from which it comes, until they plunge us into another
war. For what? What is the reward for what we have achieved, what the
incentive for what we are expected to accomplish? We cannot afford as
much food as before the war, nor of the same quality. We are in want
even of necessaries. Is it for this that we have fought? A thousand
times no. If we saved our nation we can also save our class. We have the
will and the power. Why should we not exert them?" The purpose of the
section of the community to which these demobilized soldiers mainly
belonged grew visibly definite as consciousness of their collective
force grew and became keener. Occasionally it manifested itself openly
in symptomatic spurts.
One dismal night, at a brilliant ball in a private mansion, a select
company of both sexes, representatives of the world of rank and fashion,
were enjoying themselves to their hearts' content, while their
chauffeurs watched and waited outside in the cold, dark streets, chewing
the cud of bitter reflections. Between the hours of three and four in
the morning the latter held an open-air meeting, and adopted a
resolution which they carried out forthwith. A delegation was sent
upstairs to give notice to the light-hearted guests that they must be
down in their respective motors within ten minutes on pain of not
finding any conveyances to take them home. The mutineers were nearly all
private chauffeurs in the employ of the personages to whom they sent
this indelicate ultimatum. The resourceful host, however, warded off the
danger and placated the rebellious drivers by inviting them to an
improvised little banquet of _pâtés de foie gras_, dry champagne, and
other delicacies. The general temper of the proletariat remained
unchanged. Tales of rebellion still more disquieting were current in
Paris, which, whether true or false, were aids to a correct diagnosis of
the situation.
A dancing mania broke out during the armistice, which was not confined
to the French capital. In Berlin, Rome, London, it aroused the
indignation of those whose sympathy with the spiritual life of their
respective nations was still a living force. It would seem, however, to
be the natural reaction produced by a tremendous national calamity,
under which the mainspring of the collective mind temporarily gives way
and the psychical equilibrium is upset. Disillusion, despondency, and
contempt for the passions that lately stirred them drive the people to
seek relief in the distractions of pleasures, among which dancing is
perhaps one of the mildest. It was so in Paris at the close of the long
period of stress which ended with the rise of Napoleon. Dancing then
went on uninterruptedly despite national calamities and private
hardships. "Luxury," said Victor Hugo, "is a necessity of great states
and great civilizations, but there are moments when it must not be
exhibited to the masses." There was never a conjuncture when the danger
of such an exhibition was greater or more imminent than during the
armistice on the Continent--for it was the period of incubation
preceding the outbreak of the most malignant social disease to which
civilized communities are subject.
The festivities and amusements in the higher circles of Paris recall the
glowing descriptions of the fret and fever of existence in the Austrian
capital during the historic Vienna Congress a hundred years ago. Dancing
became epidemic and shameless. In some salons the forms it took were
repellent. One of my friends, the Marquis X., invited to a dance at the
house of a plutocrat, was so shocked by what he saw there that he left
almost at once in disgust. Madame Machin, the favorite teacher of the
choreographic art, gave lessons in the new modes of dancing, and her fee
was three hundred francs a lesson. In a few weeks she netted, it is
said, over one hundred thousand francs.
The Prince de Ligne said of the Vienna Congress: "Le Congrès danse mais
il ne marche pas." The French press uttered similar criticisms of the
Paris Conference, when its delegates were leisurely picking up
information about the countries whose affairs they were forgathered to
settle. The following paragraph from a Paris journal--one of many
such--describes a characteristic scene:
The domestic staff at the Hôtel Majestic, the headquarters of the
British Delegation at the Peace Conference, held a very successful
dance on Monday evening, attended by many members of the British
Mission and Staff. The ballroom was a medley of plenipotentiaries
and chambermaids, generals and orderlies, Foreign Office attachés
and waitresses. All the latest forms of dancing were to be seen,
including the jazz and the hesitation waltz, and, according to the
opinion of experts, the dancing reached an unusually high standard
of excellence. Major Lloyd George, one of the Prime Minister's
sons, was among the dancers. Mr. G.H. Roberts, the Food Controller,
made a very happy little speech to the hotel staff.[18]
The following extract is also worth quoting:
A packed house applauded 'Hullo, Paris!' from the rise of the
curtain to the finale at the new Palace Theater (in the rue
Mogador), Paris, last night.... President Wilson, Mr. A.J. Balfour,
and Lord Derby all remained until the fall of the curtain at 12.15
... and ... were given cordial cheers from the dispersing audience
as they passed through the line of Municipal Guards, who presented
arms as the distinguished visitors made their way to their
motor-cars.[19]
Juxtaposed with the grief, discontent, and physical hardships prevailing
among large sections of the population which had provided most of the
holocausts for the Moloch of War, the ostentatious gaiety of the
prosperous few might well seem a challenge. And so it was construed by
the sullen lack-alls who prowled about the streets of Paris and told one
another that their turn would come soon.
When the masses stare at the wealthy with the eyes one so often noticed
during the eventful days of the armistice one may safely conclude, in
the words of Victor Hugo, that "it is not thoughts that are harbored by
those brains; it is events."
By the laboring classes the round of festivities, the theatrical
representations, the various negro and other foreign dances, and the
less-refined pleasures of the world's blithest capital were watched with
ill-concealed resentment. One often witnessed long lines of motor-cars
driving up to a theater, fashionable restaurant, or concert-hall,
through the opening portals of which could be caught a glimpse of the
dazzling illumination within, while, a few yards farther off, queues of
anemic men and women were waiting to be admitted to the shop where milk
or eggs or fuel could be had at the relatively low prices fixed by the
state. The scraps of conversation that reached one's ears were far from
reassuring.
I have met on the same afternoon the international world-regenerators,
smiling, self-complacent, or preoccupied, flitting by in their motors to
the Quai d'Orsay, and also quiet, determined-looking men, trudging along
in the snow and slush, wending their way toward their labor
conventicles, where they, too, were drafting laws for a new and strange
era, and I voluntarily fell to gaging the distance that sundered the two
movements, and asked myself which of the inchoate legislations would
ultimately be accepted by the world. The question since then has been
partially answered. As time passed, the high cost of living was
universally ascribed, as we saw, to the insatiable greed of the
middlemen and the sluggishness of the authorities, whose incapacity to
organize and unwillingness to take responsibility increased and augured
ill of the future of the country unless men of different type should in
the meanwhile take the reins. Practically nothing was done to ameliorate
the carrying power of the railways, to utilize the waterways, to employ
the countless lorries and motor-vans that were lying unused, to
purchase, convey, and distribute the provisions which were at the
disposal of the government. Various ministerial departments would
dispute as to which should take over consignments of meat or vegetables,
and while reports, notes, and replies were being leisurely written and
despatched, weeks or months rolled by, during which the foodstuffs
became unfit for human consumption. In the middle of May, to take but
one typical instance, 2,401 eases of lard and 1,418 cases of salt meat
were left rotting in the docks at Marseilles. In the storage magazines
at Murumas, 6,000 tons of salt meat were spoiled because it was nobody's
business to remove and distribute them. Eighteen refrigerator-cars
loaded with chilled meat arrived in Paris from Havre in the month of
June. When they were examined at the cold-storage station it was
discovered that, the doors having been negligently left open, the
contents of the cases had to be destroyed.[20] From Belgium 108,000
kilos of potatoes were received and allowed to lie so long at one of the
stations that they went bad and had to be thrown away. When these and
kindred facts were published, the authorities, who had long been silent,
became apologetic, but remained throughout inactive. In other countries
the conditions, if less accentuated, were similar.
One of the dodges to which unscrupulous dealers resorted with impunity
and profit was particularly ingenious. At the central markets, whenever
any food is condemned, the public-health authorities seize it and pay
the owner full value at the current market rates. The marketmen often
turned this equitable arrangement to account by keeping back large
quantities of excellent vegetables, for which the population was
yearning, and when they rotted and had to be carted away, received their
money value from the Public Health Department, thus attaining their
object, which was to lessen the supply and raise the prices on what they
kept for sale.[21] The consequence was that Paris suffered from a
continual dearth of vegetables and fruits. Statistics published by the
United States government showed the maximum increase in the cost of
living in four countries as follows: France, 235 per cent.; Britain, 135
per cent.; Canada, 115 per cent.; and the United States, 107 per
cent.[22] But since these data were published prices continued to rise
until, at the beginning of July, they had attained the same level as
those of Russia on the eve of the revolution there. In Paris, Lyons,
Marseilles, the prices of various kinds of fish, shell-fish, jams,
apples, had gone up 500 per cent., cabbage over 900 per cent., and
celeriac 2,000 per cent. Anthracite coal, which in the year 1914 cost 56
francs a ton, could not be purchased in 1919 for less than 360 francs.
The restaurants and hotels waged a veritable war of plunder on their
guests, most of whom, besides the scandalous prices, which bore no
reasonable relation to the cost of production, had to pay the government
luxury tax of 10 per cent, over and above. A well-known press
correspondent, who entertained seven friends to a simple dinner in a
modest restaurant, was charged 500 francs, 90 francs being set down for
one chicken, and 28 for three cocktails. The _maître d'hotel_, in
response to the pressman's expostulations, assured him that these
charges left the proprietor hardly any profit. As it chanced, however,
the journalist had just been professionally investigating the cost of
living, and had the data at his finger-ends. As he displayed his
intimate knowledge to his host, and obviously knew where to look for
redress, he had the satisfaction of obtaining a rebate of 150
francs.[23]
Nothing could well be more illuminating than the following curious
picture contributed by a journal whose representative made a special
inquiry into the whole question of the cost of living.[24] "I was dining
the other day at a restaurant of the Bois de Boulogne. There was a long
queue of people waiting at the door, some sixty persons all told, mostly
ladies, who pressed one another closely. From time to time a voice
cried: 'Two places,' whereupon a door was held opened, two patients
entered, and then it was loudly slammed, smiting some of those who stood
next to it. At last my turn came, and I went in. The guests were sitting
so close to one another that they could not move their elbows. Only the
hands and fingers were free. There sat women half naked, and men whose
voices and dress betrayed newly acquired wealth. Not one of them
questioned the bills which were presented. And what bills! The _hors
d'oeuvre_, 20 francs. Fish, 90 francs. A chicken, 150 francs. Three
cigars, 45 francs. The repast came to 250 francs a person at the very
lowest." Another journalist commented upon this story as follows: "Since
the end of last June," he said, "445,000 quintals of vegetables, the
superfluous output of the Palatinate, were offered to France at nominal
prices. And the cost of vegetables here at home is painfully notorious.
Well, the deal was accepted by the competent Commission in Paris.
Everything was ready for despatching the consignment. The necessary
trains were secured. All that was wanting was the approval of the French
authorities, who were notified. Their answer has not yet been given and
already the vegetables are rotting in the magazines."
The authorities pleaded the insufficiency of rolling stock, but the
press revealed the hollowness of the excuse and the responsibility of
those who put it forward, and showed that thousands of wagons, lorries,
and motor-vans were idle, deteriorating in the open air. For instance,
between Cognac and Jarnac the state railways had left about one
thousand wagons unused, which were fast becoming unusable.[25] And this
was but one of many similar instances.
It would be hard to find a parallel in history for the rapacity combined
with unscrupulousness and ingenuity displayed during that fateful period
by dishonest individuals, and left unpunished by the state. Doubtless
France was not the only country in which greed was insatiable and its
manifestations disastrous. From other parts of the Continent there also
came bitter complaints of the ruthlessness of profiteers, and in Italy
their heartless vampirism contributed materially to the revolutionary
outbreaks throughout that country in July. Even Britain was not exempt
from the scourge. But the presence of whole armies of well-paid,
easy-going foreign troops and officials on French soil stimulated greed
by feeding it, and also their complaints occasionally bared it to the
world. The impression it left on certain units of the American forces
was deplorable. When United States soldiers who had long been stationed
in a French town were transferred to Germany, where charges were low,
the revulsion of feeling among the straightforward, honest Yankees was
complete and embarrassing. And by way of keeping it within the bounds of
political orthodoxy, they were informed that the Germans had conspired
to hoodwink them by selling at undercost prices, in order to turn them
against the French. It was an insidious form of German propaganda!
On the other hand, the experience of British and American warriors in
France sometimes happened to be so unfortunate that many of them gave
credence to the absurd and mischievous legend that their governments
were made to pay rent for the trenches in which their troops fought and
died, and even for the graves in which the slain were buried.
An acquaintance of mine, an American delegate, wanted an abode to
himself during the Conference, and, having found one suitable for which
fifteen to twenty-five thousand francs a year were deemed a fair rent,
he inquired the price, and the proprietor, knowing that he had to do
with a really wealthy American, answered, "A quarter of a million
francs." Subsequently the landlord sent to ask whether the distinguished
visitor would take the place; but the answer he received ran, "No, I
have too much self-respect."
Hotel prices in Paris, beginning from December, 1918, were prohibitive
to all but the wealthy. Yet they were raised several times during the
Conference. Again, despite the high level they had reached by the
beginning of July, they were actually quintupled in some hotels and
doubled in many for about a week at the time of the peace celebrations.
Rents for flats and houses soared proportionately.
One explanation of the fantastic rise in rents is characteristic. During
the war and the armistice, the government--and not only the French
government--proclaimed a moratorium, and no rents at all were paid, in
consequence of which many house-owners were impoverished and others
actually beggared. And it was with a view to recoup themselves for these
losses that they fleeced their tenants, French and foreign, as soon as
the opportunity presented itself. An amusing incident arising out of the
moratorium came to light in the course of a lawsuit. An ingenious
tenant, smitten with the passion of greed, not content with occupying
his flat without paying rent, sublet it at a high figure to a man who
paid him well and in advance, but by mischance set fire to the place and
died. Thereupon the _tenant_ demanded and received a considerable sum
from the insurance company in which the defunct occupant had had to
insure the flat and its contents. He then entered an action at law
against the proprietor of the house for the value of the damage caused
by the fire, and he won his case. The unfortunate owner was condemned to
pay the sum claimed, and also the costs of the action.[26] But he could
not recover his rent.