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If the book were to have a dedication it would be, in the words of the furniture removal man, to you - from me.
While I was finishing the book, Insanity Fair, to which this is a sequel, events began to move so fast, and myself with them, that I never had time to go through the proofs with a microscope for the misprints of others and the mistakes of myself.
The first thirty-odd impressions thus contained a large but dwindling number of slips. That they dwindled was largely due -- I hardly stopped running about in the subsequent nine months for long enough meticulously to examine a single chapter -- to readers in many countries, who wrote to me, or even called on or telephoned to my publishers, to point them out. To them my most cordial thanks are due.
The same thing may happen, in a lesser degree, in this book. If it does, I tender thanks in advance.
Those spacious and leisurely days are gone when a writer, at any rate a writer in my field, might sit in a quiet house, looking over green English wealds, weigh and apportion his words in long and tranquil meditation, and with measured gesture dip his quill pen into the ink and transfer them to paper.
A writer of my type, in the mid-twentieth century, is always rushing off to catch a train or aeroplane, to keep abreast of the rush of events, and between journeys has quickly to tap his thoughts on paper.
He who runs may read. To write, you have to run still faster.
Possibly some of the things I have written about will begin to happen before the book is out. I shall not alter it if they do. I think, by leaving it as it was written, you get a more plastic view of the march of events.
The direct form of address, 'You', is intended in most cases for British readers.
The Picnic Papers, the book will remain for me. But others, good judges, tell me that the title is a bad one, that it does not convey the idea I have in mind; also, though I did not know this, it has been used before. So The Picnic Papers becomes, for you, Disgrace Abounding. I like that one, too, and think it better. But for me, this book is The Picnic Papers.
I wrote Insanity Fair as a member of a generation that was led out to fight for an ideal, and now sees that ideal being crucified while old politicians, who were old politicians when that war began which we now know has never been ended, cry 'Crucify it' and their Adam's apples run up and down like the car of a cable railway. But, being realists, they don't say 'Crucify it' nowadays; they say 'Non-intervention', or 'The sacred principle of self-extermination', no, I don't think I've got that one quite right, but you will probably remember the phrase I mean; anyway I am a member of that generation that finds no peace nor any brave new world, and I was sick of describing this daily parade of treachery and humbuggery in the anonymous shroud of 'Our own correspondent'.
I wanted, by book or by crook, to clear away some of that litter, and I don't know why I should have thought that I could do that, but I had to try or burst, so I wrote Insanity Fair, thinking that I would for this once speak freely and then sit back, close my mind to this Hogarthian pageant of brutality and covetousness and lust, don again the hooded shroud of 'Our own correspondent' and write eloquent summaries of trade statistics, emasculated descriptions of the daily scene in our contemporary Europe.
But book, God help me, leads to book. While the binders were glueing the covers on to Insanity Fair, making it ready for its appearance on All Fools' Day 1938, while the bells of St. Stephen's in Vienna were ticking off the last seconds of my forty-third birthday, March 11th, 1938, German armies had already begun to write the sequel in iron caterpillar-tracks that came down from the frontier to Vienna, crashed through the Ringstrasse, and turned off to the right where the road leads to Czechoslovakia, barely an hour away.
That self-same night or later, I knew, they would march on into Czechoslovakia, and England, producing from behind her back yet another wreath with the words 'We deplore the methods used', which means rather less than 'Yours very sincerely' at the end of a letter dismissing an employee of thirty years' standing just before he qualifies for a pension, England would sit back and read with relief letters in the newspapers from an archbishop, two retired ambassadors, an oriental potentate, four peers and five university professors, proving that England had in her magnanimity given Germany yet another Fair Deal, and we must at all costs continue in the path of collaboration with Germany, and God is on the side of the big Italians. Especially, we must continue 'to establish personal contact' with the dictators, this being the modern name for that process by which one party supplies the pants and the other party the kick, the first party repeatedly practising the ancient Christian principle of turning the other cheek.
But I knew, on that night, that Austria meant Czechoslovakia, and that Czechoslovakia meant Hungary, Poland, Rumania; that these meant Bulgaria, Greece and Yugoslavia, the whole of Danubia and the Balkans, German invincibility - and, ultimately, you. I quickly wrote a few more chapters for Insanity Fair to say this, and six months later a Swiss newspaper, the Basler Nachrichten, took up the book, reviewed it, and said, 'It must be a bitter comfort to the author that his prophecies have been so far fulfilled.'
No. Bitter, not a comfort. Comfort there would have been if they had been proved wrong, or if they had found in England wide enough belief to get something done. To be a true prophet of woe is no satisfaction.
So The Picnic Papers (that is, Disgrace Abounding) became inevitable. I could not go on for ever writing new chapters for Insanity Fair. You have expanding bookshelves, but you can hardly have an expanding book. If you could, I would write one as long as a concertina. The little book might go on for ever. Perhaps a loose-leaf book will be the solution of the writer's problem in these galloping times, when he cannot dip his pen into the ink quickly enough, or tap the keys of his typewriter fast enough, or speak into the recording machine rapidly enough, to keep up with the rush of events, the hurtling advance of roaring mechanized armies, the flight of fugitives, the tears of women and the crying of children, the shattering of idols and the betrayal of ideals, the erasion of old and the limning of new frontiers.
Why write at all, for that matter? The old saw, that the typewriter is mightier than high explosive, is demonstrably absurd. But, somehow, I must, as long as the light holds, and that will not be very long. The twilight of our gods, the gods that stood for humanity and justice and the right of men to speak and write for these things, is thickening fast. Soon a right venerable gentleman, applauded by the overwhelming majority of a House elected to protect small nations against greedy great ones, may tell you that 'a national emergency' exists and present you with some noble- sounding Act, 'for the tranquillization of public opinion' or what not, and you may wake up to find that you are gagged and bound, that you may not criticize the latest Fair Deal that has been given to Germany, in Spain or lord knows where, that the voice of the people may be raised only in one grand sweet song of admiration for the achievements of the government.
Somebody wrote about Insanity Fair, 'There ought to be a law. There ought to be a law preventing foreign correspondents from writing any more now-it-can-be-told memoirs.'
There probably will be. Be of good cheer.
But for the nonce we may write, comic little men who go tailing about after lost causes, and the voice of Insanity Fair rings loud in my mind calling for its mate. The Picnic Papers (I mean, Disgrace Abounding). I hope time at least remains for that happy union to be consummated, and I even see in imagination the features of their first-born, A Tale of Three Cities, Vienna, Prague and Budapest, and how they all became German provincial towns, and after that The Decline and Fall of the British Empire - but you have heard that one before and you don't care for it, you are not bemused, and how right you are.
Before we start on this picnic I think you have a right to know something about your host. I wish I could tell you just who and what he is. I find that many different opinions exist about me. I am, as I read, no Red, an extreme anti-Fascist, a bitter critic of the British Left, a British Tory, a man who will be called prejudiced more by persons belonging to the political Right than the Left, and other things.
I regret this diversity of views about me, because I don't like to think that you don't know where I am. An intelligent man should be born into this world alive either a little Liberal or a little Conservative, and having chosen his watertight compartment, he should stay there. All the good and noble ideas must obviously be in one of those compartments, the red one, or the true blue one, or the brown one, and then you have your label. When you have people gadding about who think they find something good and something bad in all the compartments, the time has come for stern action: hold them down and pin a label on them - Red, for preference.
But in this matter of political hue, I have decided to declare war. I have sought out the most repulsive colour I can find and have decided to give its name to anybody who disagrees with my opinions on any subject. The colour is puce. Any individual who disagrees with me is a Puce. Any body of individuals who disagree with me are Puces. I expect in time to found a national movement against Puces, who are the cause of all that is wrong in England. I even expect in time to find anti-Puce States banded together to save the world from Pucery.
So you know just what I am against. What I am, what I am for: these are more difficult things to state. I only knew one other man in my case, and he was the hero of an enthralling human drama that I found in a volume of German statistics, which are far stranger than truth. In the section devoted to the number of German strikes and Lockouts in a certain year (yes, that was before Hitler) I found, in a column headed 'Number of strikers', the numeral 'I', and in the next column, headed 'Working days lost', the figure '187', and in the column headed 'Result', the words 'No agreement'.
I scarcely dared believe my eyes when I found 'I'. Men had sought for centuries the secret of making gold, the Saragossa Sea, the stone of wisdom, the sunken city, and a cure for baldness, and had failed. I had found something rarer than them all - The One Man Strike. Somewhere in Germany a working man had struck, and struck for more than half the year. Spurning all inducements, braving all threats, picketing the works to keep himself from blacklegging, daily growing thinner and colder and hungrier, he had struck and struck and struck, and at the year's end he was still striking and 'No agreement' had been reached.
A stupendous, a Homeric, an immortal conflict! To my last day I shall regret that Hitler then came to power, abolished strikes, and prevented me from reading the next instalment of that enthralling tale in the next volume of statistics. But I looked back through earlier volumes, for previous years, and, believe it or not, 'I' was always there. 'I' had struck, for longer or shorter periods, for several years. He was unconquerable. Every year he was there, striking, striking, striking.
A kindred spirit. The One Man Striker, the incorrigible sales-resister, the professional rebel, the champion of a lost cause.
So now you know, approximately.
Let's get down to that picnic. Unpack your hamper, bring out the potted arrogance, the bottled ignorance, the tinned snobbery, the upper, middle, and lower class sandwiches; make yourselves comfortable on your patent inertia cushions; I hope you have brought the aspirin with you, in case those troublesome pains in your apathy come on; play something on the gramophone that tells of England and Englishmen and the things that England stood for and stands for. Strew the litter about.
Ladies and gentlemen, Puces and anti-Puces, The Picnic Papers.
Or rather, Disgrace Abounding.
Insanity Fair. It was apt, that title that I hit on one sunny day at Montreux two years before. A colleague, one Shakespeare, had the same idea a few hundred years earlier - a mad world, my masters. Somebody else, soon after the War Called Great, put the same idea into American - this cockeyed world.
May 1938, in London. A mad and merry month, my masters. The buds were fighting their springtime battle against the coaldust-laden air. Everywhere the road-builder was at work; no avenues were being left unturned. Mr. Victor Gollancz had announced a Christian Book Club. As I wandered, seething, along the Edgware Road, a bareheaded woman with lilac hair and a long cigarette holder in her mouth passed in front of me, and by 1940 I expect they will be shaving their heads bald and painting them green with pink spots and chewing betel nut, and very decorative that ought to be, and very good for white prestige, and as long as we can keep it up the black man ought to be proud to carry the white man's burden.
At the Oval or Lord's or somewhere somebody had made hundreds or thousands of runs, I don't know which; he had been at the wicket for days and days, good old Thingummybob, and this put everybody in good humour, so that clerks and shop assistants and stockbrokers smoked their pipes with greater relish in the homeward train to Wimbledon and Brixton and Harrow and felt their hearts warm within them as they hosed the garden. Good old Thingummybob. We shall win the Ashes.
Ashes, ashes, thought I, what the devil are the Ashes, and who cares about them, anyway? How many Englishmen know where Asch is? - which is much more important now. The wind and the dust swirled round the corners and gave me headaches, which I cured by going to the enormous picture theatres, where every prospect was vile but the air was pure 'and dust-free, for it had been passed through some machine. This is not a joke: to get a breath of fresh air in our London, where I was born, you have to go to the pictures.
I went to the theatres. I saw that slick and amusing play George and Margaret, in which George and Margaret are always just about to appear but never do, and I loved Jane Baxter, her looks, her figure, her acting, her enunciation. I liked the other players, the clean finish of their performances, the way they played to each other. This was a merry evening, an oasis in the desert of London. But Joyce Barbour had played a scurvy trick on me, I felt. Only a few months before, as it seemed to me, just about the time that I began gadding about Europe, I had admired her as she led Mr. Cochran's young ladies on to the stage, and now here she was playing the matronly mother, and as I had not altered in the least, between these two occasions I was vaguely perturbed.
The vast changes that a world war and twenty-five years had brought to the English stage amused me. Not long before that war, I think, the word 'bloody' was spoken for the first time on a London stage, I believe in one of Mr. Shaw's plays. Now the word 'bloody' occurred at least once in all plays of this kind, as inevitably as the butler who brought in the letter. The new thing was that the leading young lady had to speak at least once about sleeping with a man, and at this point she either dropped her eyes to the stage or fixed them glassily on a point in the auditorium just above the heads of the people in the last row of the pit. The procedure used apparently depended on the Feingefühl, on the nicety of feeling, of the producer. What, I wondered in awe, would we be hearing on the London stage after another generation?
I went to see a play of Noel Coward's and watched the stalls chuckling comfortably at the quartette that sang 'The Stately Homes of England'. This was the kind of satire, like that of Evelyn Waugh, that they liked. It did not hurt, and was properly respectful of the Old School Tie. And there on the stage, praise be, I saw Fritzi Massary. Paris has its Mistinguett, and now London had its Massary, and I was glad that London would no longer be deprived of that which Berlin and Vienna had so long enjoyed.
For that matter, many of the theatres and picture theatres I went to in England seemed suddenly to have decided not to withhold from the public any longer talent of which Berlin, Vienna, Budapest and Prague had previously had the benefit.
This London. As I wandered around it, in my disgruntled way, in May 1938, I asked myself, 'Where are the Englishmen?'
Gradually I found them. A few of them are sitting in the clubs around Pall Mall, thinking that all is for the best in the best of all possible clubs and God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.' Some of the others you will also find in that Central London. They are selling newspapers, serving socks and ties, standing in lackey's uniform outside picture theatres, while inside, near the cash desk, hovers The Boss, a foreign-visaged man with a glistening white shirt-front. Many others are sitting, packed together, in the trains homeward bound for the packed-together houses in Walthamstow, Wembley, Pinner or Putney. The Slaves of The Job. Pipe-between-teeth; umbrella-hooked-over-wrist; evening-newspaper-between-the-hands; atop, the black hat that shows that all Englishmen are ultimately equal, even if they haven't an Old School Tie.
By the way, don't mind if I keep on about the Old School Tie. I see that somebody said he could not understand how or why I could squirm when I see one, but the explanation is simple. I don't squirm for myself, because I have had a break and shaken off the shackles. I squirm for England and the things that this system of privilege and protection and preference has done to England. Why abolish purchase and pocket boroughs if you are going to reintroduce them in another form - the Old School Tie?
If you don't believe me, about London and England, read what Kurt von Stutterheim of the Berliner Tageblatt says about it:
England's foundation ... is in worse case than France's. In England the early change-over to pasture, together with centuries of emigration of farmers overseas, has led to a thinning-out of the native peasant element, which every sensible Englishman regards with deep anxiety. In the South, particularly, a peasant family in the Continental sense has become a rarity. Instead of working on the family farm, the peasant girl is serving cakes and lemonade in a near-by tea-room, while her brother is occupied on a sports ground or at a filling station.That is photographically accurate, but to get the whole of the picture you must look at the London scene, as I have shown it.
Central London, largely a cosmopolitan settlement of parasites who live by selling goods and services that London could well dispense with - expensive but inferior food and drink, betting agencies, gambling machines, bottle parties, nude revues, lunatic advertising, and the whole process of selling nothing for something. Outer London, the wilderness where the Slaves of The Job live in houses that repeat themselves in endless monotony, like incurable hiccoughs. Beyond that, England, now given over to the cult of the thistle, the stately home, the ring-fenced park, the prosecution of trespassers, the tea-room, the filling station, the mushroom factory.
When I was last in London I went to a revue, one of the best and wittiest I have ever seen, at the Little Theatre, and there two players, a man and a woman, sang a song about England. The picture on the stage was a living reproduction of Ford Madox Brown's 'The Last of England'. They sat behind a circular opening in a dark drop-cloth, so that they looked like two figures in a miniature. Behind them you saw the rigging of a ship and the sea. They sat looking steadily and sadly before them, at England that they were leaving for ever, and only their lips moved as they sang. They sang well, and with feeling. They sang of English fields, of English friends, of the spring in English woods, of their youth in English lanes, of the smoke rising from English chimneys, of red English roofs, of their grief at leaving these things.
Ah, if only I, who have so often looked back at England, had a picture like that in my mind. Then this song could bring me back from the ends of the world, back from the grave itself. But am I, when I die of a bomb or a fever in some corner of a foreign land, to exclaim with my dwindling breath, 'Brondesbury, my Brondesbury', to summon before my glazing eyes a picture of Number 21 Streatley Road? If only England were like that song. If only London were like the Lambeth Walk. England could be like that, if you had men who cared for England, instead of men who only care for their own class. But drive along the coast road from Worthing to Eastbourne. Take a walk down the Lambeth High Street.
When I was last in London my friends reproached me for my views about England. 'You really go too far', they said. 'You take too gloomy a view. After all', they said, 'my country right or wrong, you know, don't you know.'
'Oh, yeah', said I, 'I know what you mean, I know that one. My country clean or dirty. My country slummy or unslummy.'
The English people are sound, I think. But what has been done to England in these last hundred years, and more especially in these last twenty years since the World War is mortal sin.
Yet the arguments of my friends gave me to think. Was it possible, I asked myself, that the jaundice was in my own eye, that Shoreditch and Shoreham and Bethnal Green and Bermondsey were in reality all bright and beautiful places filled with sturdily independent British workpeople? I determined to set out in search of 'This England' of the railway companies' and newspaper advertisements, ploughmen homeward plodding their weary way, sheep sleepily ambling through dappled sunlit lanes, cows lowing in the meadows, venerable piles, dignified debates in ancient halls, a race of men and women 'dauntlessly courageous and doggedly determined', as the good Simon said in putting across a rather bitter-tasting budget.
I drove about Sussex in a car, but these fair scenes eluded me. I saw, or thought I saw, a ravaged countryside, a land where every prospect displeases and only beans are bile. Bungalows. Thistles. Ye Olde this and that, with men standing outside them in uniforms apparently meant to recall that green and pleasant England which we all know from the coloured prints but which has now been spoiled and defaced, as I fear, beyond repair.
Villages where the children looked unhealthier than the town children, and believe it or not but I learned in these villages, with cows on all sides, that the children have to be reared on tinned milk because all the fresh milk is bought by the cities, and that is a thing that couldn't happen in any other country I know. Little arty shops.
As for the lads and lasses of this England, I found them where Kurt von Stutterheim found them - working at filling stations and sports grounds, in tea-rooms and picture theatres.
The appearance of my countrypeople often surprised and perplexed me. So many of them had a hungry, caged and care-worn air which I attributed to sex repression until I learned, from diligent perusal of the advertisement columns in the newspapers, that it was due to night starvation. Why, I wondered, did so many of them go about looking as if they feared that they were about to be accosted by someone to whom they hadn't been introduced? Why did they laugh in an embarrassed fashion when you told them a joke, unless it was a smutty one, and then you all roared together in corners. Why did they begin every sentence with a deprecatory cough and 'Er - well ...'
Still in search of British Institutions, I visited the Mother of Parliaments and spoke, in a committee room, to two or three score Members, of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, of what was coming in Europe, of the things of which I understood a little. Left of me sat a General who was of progressive mind and broad and humane ideas. Over against me sat a Duchess, a woman of enlightenment and feeling. Right of me sat an Admiral, a die-hard of the truest deep-water blue. The others, predominantly Conservatives, were men of similar type. The great majority of them, as I judged from their questions and manner, were well-informed and intelligent people. But I felt despondent as I contemplated them. They seemed to be the prisoners of a party machine from which they could not or would not break away even when it dragged England, and therewith Europe, from one disaster to another. Elected by an enthusiastic country to enforce peace against peacebreakers, they were now docilely following the Government in the opposite direction, in the policy of taking steps -- long ones -- away from the peacebreakers every time they became truculent.
I went to Another Place, to the Museum at the Other End of the Passage, to the House of Lords. It was a great and historic occasion, perhaps the best possible occasion on which to study this British Institution.
A Bill had been introduced to transfer to public ownership the coal that lies beneath England's once fair countryside and to pay compensation to those great landlords beneath whose acres it is found. You all know, or possibly you don't, the part that the discovery and mining of coal has played in making England what it is, in disfiguring the face of England and undermining the stamina of the people in the last hundred years.
On the one hand, it made England prosperous as she was never prosperous before, and if you care to go and look at large areas of the coal country and the slum areas of London to-day you may murmur, 'If this be the price of prosperity, Lord God we have paid in full', and you will be right. Read any trustworthy account you like of housing conditions and the standards of living in those blackened wildernesses called Special Areas, and you will never feel quite the same again towards the lump of coal you pick up in the tongs and put on your drawing-room fire.
Anyway, this Bill hit the coalowners, some of whom are said never to have seen a coal-mine, because they lease the coal rights to the colliery owners, right in their principles and pockets. London, on this May day when I went to the House of Lords, was in the morning full of peers anxiously asking the way to Westminster. London at all times, if you stay in that little London of the clubs, seems full of titled people, a city of dreadful knights, but on this day there were more than at any time since the coronation. Not that I have anything against titled people. They fulfil a useful part in our economic life. What would our advertisers of face cream do without them?
The House of Lords was hushed and dim. At first I only saw rows of white blobs, the faces of England's peers, whose sombre garments merged indistinguishably into the surrounding gloom. They were all there, row on row, Lord Coalmine, Lord Whisky, Lord Blueblood, and Lord Beer; Lord Tobacco, Lord Purebred, Lord Coalmine, Lord Newspaper and Lord Bookstall; Lord Pedigree, Lord Battleaxe, Lord Motorcar, Lord Readymade, Lord Wholesale, Lord Party, and Lord Coalmine; Lord Abraham, Lord Israel and Lord Isaac.
Bald Heads in the gloaming; the stately domes of England. A solemn occasion. The Archbishop of Canterbury had in resonant tones pronounced the word Expropriation. Ah, that dread word. I remembered it in Germany, when Brüning wished to foreclose on great estates hopelessly insolvent and indebted to the public exchequer and, in fulfilment of Hindenburg's promise, settle ex-servicemen smallholders on them. Bolshevism, the squires had called it there, and they overthrew Brüning and brought Hitler to power.
You couldn't call it Bolshevism here, because a Conservative Government had brought in the Bill, but Expropriation was enough. A dreadful word.
As I watched, a faint murmur broke the hush and I saw that the lips of one of the blobs were moving. The Primate had painted a pathetic picture of the loss which the funds of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners would suffer from this Bill, a thing which I hope my miner friend, Herbert Hoggins of Durham, sufficiently appreciates, and the debate was joined on this point. A noble lord gently intoned his regret that 'the poor clergy who are already not sufficiently well paid in this country are going to lose £120,000 by this Bill', and mentioned in passing that the royalty owners might lose £2,000,000 a year. Another noble lord, apparently an outsider who had gate-crashed, said he had never been a miner or a royalty owner but intervened 'to remind your Lordships of a side of this Bill which is in danger of being forgotten - the welfare of the miners themselves'. These cads, he said, were not unwilling that complete justice should be done to the royalty owner but they also wanted justice to be rendered to the coal hewer - you know, that little man down in the bowels of the earth who scratches and drags the lumps of coal out of the earth and has never been to the House of Lords.
Then another noble marquess rose and made a speech which, as a powerful and reasoned defence of the rights of property, was the most convincing thing I ever heard. It was unanswerable.
Nobody would deny, he said, that any man who owned land was entitled to quarry gravel or sand from it 'and there is no reason why coal should be treated differently from gravel or sand'. You dig a small hole in the ground, he said, and get something; you dig a little farther and get something else; you dig still farther and get something else again; 'how on earth can it be suggested that those commodities should be treated in a different way?'
How? On earth?
If the noble marquess had a fault it was, in my opinion, that he showed something of that reluctance boldly to claim the full measure of his rights which unfortunately marks so many Englishmen in our time. He did not go far enough. Australia belongs to him - if he only digs far enough. But why only that which lies below the earth, why not that which is above it? The moon, during its passage across the acres which belong to Lord Coalmine, is his.
His argument is irrefutable. The land and all that is on or under it belongs to you who own it. You try it, you who have a semi-detached house and an eighth of an acre in Brixton; dig down a mile and see what the local authorities say to you.
By the way, have you heard the one about the 'Access to Mountains Bill'? Do you know that there is an 'Access to Mountains Bill'? Men have been trying to make it law in one form or another for 50 years, and always it has been shelved by some manoeuvre. In England you have to pass a law to have 'Access to Mountains' Somewhere in England there are derelict areas, there is a Black Country. Not far away are hills, to which the workers, the miners, the unemployed, the destitutes would fain repair on Sundays to get a little air into their clogged lungs. They cannot get there, because everywhere are keep-out notices, trespassers-will-be-prosecuted boards.
So you have an 'Access to Mountains Bill', which does not get to the Statute Book, and the mountains remain inaccessible.
But back to the House of Lords. The noble marquess laboured under such emotional strain, as he upheld his rights, that he twice nearly raised his voice. Telling of an experience almost too horrible to relate, he said he himself was a member of the Assembly of the Church of England, at a meeting of which a proposal was 'actually' (hold on to your seats) made that the Church should refuse to receive any more rents from coal because it was immoral to do so, and that, he said warmly, was not just. 'Either you believe in the sanctity of private property or you do not.' There were, he added, 'disadvantages in the democratic principle and one of these was apparent now'.
So now you know just what is wrong with the democratic principle - not the slums, not under-nutrition, not unemployment, not bad health, but irreverence for the sanctity of private property. Now you know just why you ought to have a dictatorship.
But try to uphold the sanctity of private property if you are a small property-owner, not a big one, and you may have very unpleasant experiences, like that Devonshire poultry farmer who twice asked the local fox-hunters to keep off his land and threatened to shoot the hounds if they did not. His complaint was treated as 'silly, futile and unreasonable', and when the hunt came across his poultry farm again and he shot a hound he was prosecuted, fined £5, and ordered to pay £6 8s. 6d. costs. You may put up 'keep-out' boards against unemployed, but not against fox-hunters. You may forbid English workers to have access to mountains, but you may not forbid English fox-hunters to have access to poultry farms.
Then another noble lord, who had inherited his coal from a long line of ancestors, defended 'private enterprise' in coal-mining. One of the best of all forms of private enterprise, in England is to inherit a coal-mine.
Somebody may say that in these quotations I have been 'tearing passages from their context'. The answer is, yes I have, and so what?
These men were all so rich, and their languid wrangling about whether they should debatably receive a little less or not seemed so stratospherically distant from the plane on which the millions live and work and have their being that I grew bored with it.
But I was irritated by their windy and paralytic English, that exasperatingly futile English of the after-dinner speaker, the bazaar-opener, the letter-writer-to-The Times.
'My Lords, I do not think that anybody who has listened to the debate on this Bill can fail to be impressed ...' How, for the sake of grammar, does a human being fail to be impressed?
'My Lords, I ask your Lordships' indulgence for a few moments' (three-quarters of an hour) 'in order to make certain observations ... I am not certain that the speech which we have just heard from the noble Marquess has not really disposed of any reasons for passing this Bill at all and has not in fact shown that the same results which the Government may have in their minds would have been quite well achieved in another way.'
How many negatives, and how little affirmation!
'My Lords, in venturing to follow the two very powerful speeches to which we have just listened I feel I ought to apologize to the House for taking part in the debate ...'
'My Lords, this is the first time I have ever spoken in your Lordships' House and I crave that indulgence which is always so readily granted by your Lordships to those who are inexperienced in the art of debate' (nice young fellow, that).
'My Lords, as one of the oldest members of your Lordships' House I hope I may with great respect be allowed to congratulate my noble friend the Duke of Cucumberland on his very effective maiden speech.'
'My Lords, before addressing your Lordships for a few minutes' (half an hour) 'on this Bill I should like to join my tribute of congratulation to those that have been made to the noble Duke who made his maiden speech to-night. I think it must be a matter of congratulation to your Lordships as well as to himself that in his case the principle of heredity is so finely maintained by nature and that there have descended to him the great qualities that from generation to generation have always distinguished his family.'
My aunt! My maiden aunt! My maiden speech! In 1938, with Mussolini in Abyssinia and Spain, Hitler in Austria and almost in Czechoslovakia! Can't you hear the simpering Regency dowagers in the Pump Room at Bath? Why, in the name of prose and prolix, all this begging and craving and venturing and apologizing and indulging and respecting. Why not say something? What is this blight that has come upon us? Why must we call derelict areas Special Areas, war a Possible Emergency, lavatories Cloakrooms? What are you afraid of?
Eventually the debate was adjourned. Before it was resumed 79 miners had been killed in an accident at Markham Colliery.
Continuing my study of British Institutions I went to the Tower of London. Teas. Beefeaters. The Crown Jewels. Sightseers goggling and giggling at a brass-plate where somebody had been beheaded; how long a time has to elapse before an execution becomes funny? In one of the towers some armour and uniforms. I could not capture here the feeling of community with the past, of history in stone, that I have had in ancient buildings in other countries.
I left the Tower of London, and walked across Tower Bridge, and a hundred yards down the road and turned to the left, and there I found a British Institution, at last. Bermondsey. Go and see it. Little narrow streets, little narrow alleys, little narrow courts. Dark and tiny rooms. Lavatories? Bathrooms? Find them if you can. Basement windows about a foot above pavement level, just enough to admit a very little light, and in the dungeons behind these windows men and women and children live, three and four and five in a room. On the outer walls decaying paper crowns, faded fragments of Union Jacks. The Coronation, for once in a generation, brought a little colour and merrymaking to Bermondsey, which had no representative, unless it was a member of parliament, in that berobed and becoroneted and bediademed throng. Round the corner you will find a tablet on the wall of the little Church, with many names on it, English names this time. They died - for Bermondsey. If you search for it you may find a Slum Clearance Scheme. In the course of the next five years they may contrive to pull down and rebuild a dozen of these streets; there are hundreds of them in Bermondsey.
I have seen their like in Bethnal Green and Shoreditch and Whitechapel and in a dozen other places. Go there some time. Instead of getting off the bus at Piccadilly or the Bank, go on to the end of the run. Take a look at London.
Consider Bethnal Green. I walked through the streets of Bethnal Green with my good friend. We compared impressions. She had never been there before. She knew the poorer districts of other great cities, Moabit and Ottakring and Ferencz Varos and Belleville, and she had, some years earlier, seen the West End of London, and now lamented the changes she found there: the tawdry and trashy little shops that are springing up there, the disappearance of the last remnants of the solid English characteristics that still lingered until a few years ago, the international gang of tricksters, smart guys, professional emigrants, cheap jacks, procurers, share pushers, pimps, confidence men, quack doctors, flashy dentists, cheats big and little, that now prowl round the happy hunting ground between Piccadilly and Oxford Street.
But she had never seen Bethnal Green, and we explored it together. It lies in the heart of the greatest and richest city in the world. It is monstrous.
In that same street we found one butcher's shop, one fishmonger's, one grocer's, one baker's, one greengrocer's next to another, and all packed from floor to ceiling with food. We had never seen so much food, and it was all relatively cheap and of excellent quality - good red meat, good bacon, butter and eggs, good fish, good fruit and vegetables. You cannot see so much food, such good food, such cheap food in the working-class districts of any big city that I know.
Somebody must buy this food. The sale of food must be immense, or the shops could not afford to carry such stocks, all fresh. Therefore, we argued, the people of Bethnal Green have enough to eat. They must have money for food, whatever else they lack. There were even dozens of catsmeat, and dogsmeat stalls, a thing you will see nowhere else, and the inhabitants of Bethnal Green must have food for themselves if a man can make a living by selling the meat they need for their household animals.
So the people were well fed. I had previously had the impression that, by and large, a man who meant to could earn enough money in England to buy enough food for himself and his dependants, and what I saw seemed to confirm this. Then why did the people look so haggard, so harassed, so drawn, so careworn, the children so unkempt and often so unhealthy?
We discussed this, my good friend and I, as we wandered through the side streets that lead off Bethnal Green Road, or for that matter any other High Street in any mean London quarter. We looked at these streets and thought we had found the answer.
The houses and the living conditions. These people have food, but they have nothing else. These miles and miles of dingy boxes that the jerrybuilder, in his blindness, has made of wood and stone. The fetid and smoke-laden air. These people are the prisoners of an era of indiscriminate building, on a low level of intelligence and forethought the like of which no other great city that I have seen can show. Beauty in their homes, beauty in their surroundings, is beyond their dreams, and what is the use of wages that will only buy food?
Even fresh air is beyond them. The city, sprawling ever farther and farther afield, cuts them off from the countryside save on rare bank holiday sorties by charabanc, and even when they get there it is all littered with random building and filling stations and golf clubs and keep-out-of-here notices and don't-go-there notices and big private parks, and at the end they fall out of the charabanc into a pub, from lack of any other place to go, and afterwards they fall out of the pub into the charabanc and go home, having had a jolly day in the country.
If you study the advertisement columns of The Times, from which you can learn a great deal, you will from time to time see a notice that reads something like this:
Bill and Lizzie calling. 5s. will send us to the seaside for a day.I know of a charwoman in Germany who in the summer of 1938 made her second trip to Norway, not as the guest of Lady Bountiful, but in her own good right, under the auspices of the National Socialist leisure-time organization for workers, Kraft durch Freude.
You still could do something about Bethnal Green, and you could even do it under democratic government, if you could only oust the old men and the old idea that Power and Office are things to be kept circulating among a small group of people, all interconnected through marriage and Old School and University associations.
Not the merits of the man, his experience, his qualifications, his energy, his enterprise count, only that you knew him in this House at Eton or that College at Oxford and his niece, Flanella Prune, married your nephew, young Ian Hopscotch, and he has an embattled stronghold in the hierarchy of the Party which gives him an unanswerable claim to office. So you take this man, who may have started life as a lawyer or whatnot, and one day you make him Foreign Minister, and the next Minister for Air, and the next First Lord of the Admiralty, and after that Minister for Public Health, and apparently no specialized knowledge is needed for these posts, they just pass round, and that is why you have Bethnal Green, which, like Czechoslovakia, is one of those places you know nothing about.
Office for the sake of office, not for the good of the people.
Look at these Lordly Ones, as Peter Howard once wrote, in 1938. Of twenty-two Cabinet Ministers more than half were either lords, sons of lords, or married to lords' daughters. Two-thirds of the junior Ministers were Lordly Ones. One in ten of them might have become members of the Administration if they were commoners. Be in the peerage or marry into it is the golden rule. England seems to have been made safe for plutocracy.
Look at England. Is England a good advertisement for this system of the ruling class? The few men that break through to the top only do so by submitting to the golden chains of this class. What does Ramsay MacDonald look like to-day in retrospect? An elderly and bemused ex-Socialist standing between a white shirt and a diadem on the steps of Londonderry House. The same fate befell all those who went his way. But in doing so they destroyed the Labour Party, which might have reinvigorated England. There is no salvation from that party to-day, if I am any judge.
From Bethnal Green to Belgravia seems a long way, but actually a relationship exists between them - that of cause and effect. If you had some great specialist in municipal administration, in housing and health, as Minister for these things, Bethnal Green could never have happened. Bethnal Green has come about because in England family, class and party, rank and influence are the qualifications for office, not specialized knowledge or experience or energy, and the ultimate aim of this system is to keep the sweets of office rotating among a small inter-linked class. You may have, somewhere in England, a civic genius, a man who could build you cities to compare with those of Greece and Rome, who could give your workpeople sunshine and light and air and health and beauty. What means has he of reaching a post where he can do these things? If he has not an Old School Tie it is still remotely possible that he may induce some local Conservative Association, if they think him docile enough, to put him up as candidate at an election. Arrived in Parliament, he disappears among the crowd of back benchers, threatened with boycott if they vote against the Government on any issue.
So you have Bethnal Green, on which I rancorously turned my back that May day, when I had seen enough. I came back through the city and the newspaper placards told me, in great flaring letters, 'Czechs Mobilizing'. I forgot Bethnal Green and thought of Prague and Eger, of German armies thundering into and over Vienna. Now British bombers, heavy, cumbersome craft, laboured over the City. Men standing at a corner looked up at them. One said, 'What price war to-morrow?' and the others laughed. Typists were putting their heads out of windows and looking anxiously skyward. It was Friday, May 20th. I was due in a few days to go back to Central Europe. 'Will it come before I get back?' I asked myself. For the first time I felt in London, even in London, that leaden feeling of apprehension that had held me in the last months before the annexation of Austria, that had borne upon me with redoubled weight when I saw that lightning mechanized invasion.
The next day, as the first of my farewells to England, I went to see the Naval and Military Tournament at Olympia. I wanted to see how much that show had changed in twenty years, what sort of an impression England's armed forces made now that Germany, rearmed, was the mightiest military nation the world had ever seen.
It had not changed much. There was the unidentifiable Somebody in the Royal Box, taking the salute after each item. There were the sailors and stokers from Portsmouth and Chatham hurling themselves and their field-guns over bottomless chasms and back again. There was the officer of the day announcing each item through the microphone, and there, I swear, was the same joke about the Dear Old Lady who, being shown the gun used in this hair-raising performance, said, 'I knew there was a catch in it; it's hollow'. Ah, those Dear Old Ladies, those Elderly Parties, those Frenchmen who mispronounce their English and on their return from a shooting party announce, 'I have two braces to my bags', or something screamingly funny of the same kind, those plumbers' mates, those ill-bred self-made men! What a gallery of comic figures. Thank God for our sense of humour.
Then came the Scots Greys, cantering tinnily round to the music of American jazz, the Royal Inniskilling Dragoons waltzing and curvetting and prancing to 'The Lambeth Walk'. Have the English no sense of the congruous?, I asked myself. If they respect tradition so much, in uniform, why not in the musical accompaniment?
But for that matter, why those uniforms of fifty or more years ago? Why do soldiers cling so grimly to the past, but only to the recent past? Even the Germans, who cherish their military traditions just as much as you do, and perhaps more, have made no attempt to restore pre-war uniforms. They have fully accepted the implications of progress, of mechanization. Their soldiers look just as well in the modern uniforms. Why send the Scots Greys out looking like Lady Butler? If you love the past and its uniforms so much, then do the thing properly. Send them out in powdered wigs and three-cornered hats. Or in armour and battle axes. Or dress them in skins, paint them with woad, and give them clubs. But why these Crimean or Afghan or South African uniforms, or whatever they are?
Tin soldiers, trotting round the tan arena. Even the public that day felt the lack of reality; only two months before, roaring petrol-driven hordes had crashed into Vienna, outside the placards were telling how the Czechoslovaks were manning their frontier defences. Languid applause followed the red coats as they jingle-jangled out of the arena.
Then the big doors were flung open wide and with a zipp and a roar the motor-cyclists raced in. Goggles. Crash helmets. Screaming exhausts. Flying dust. The audience sat up as if it had had a dose of strychnine. Here was the spirit of our contemporary times, the man on the machine. This was real, this they understood. Speed, noise, the smell of petrol, dust-clouds. This was 1938. The electric feeling which quickened pulses impart to the air, filled the great hall. A volley of cheering followed the riders as they sped out and the doors closed behind them.
A faint noise as of seagulls, swelling as the big doors opened again to a music that grew and grew until it filled every nook and cranny of the hall and the massed bands of the Scottish regiments marched in. Here were uniforms that had history woven into their tartans, music that told of battle and siege and victory and death and Scottish hills and valleys, men who looked straight bred and marched with a step and a swing that held and fascinated the eye.
How have the Scots contrived to keep their costume and their music and their traditions and their feeling of nationhood intact, while the English have lost all these things?
I can find no answer to the question, but as I came away I regretted that it should be so. Why does our England give her children none of these things? I did not know. But I set to packing my bags, and on a sunny morning started out once more for the places I knew and understood - the lands along the Danube, where the Czechoslovaks, and behind them the Hungarians, the Rumanians, the Yugoslavs all stood with their faces turned anxiously or expectantly towards Germany, implacable, resolute, mighty, urgent.
I went down the narrow stairs. I loaded myself and my bags into a taxi and in the early morning hours found myself for the umpteenth time, ah, how many times since back-to-the-front in the war, bowling through Hyde Park Europewards - and don't write and tell me that England is in Europe, because it isn't.
Somewhere in Westminster my bags were weighed, my tickets checked. A woman was there, crying, while her married sister, married in England, tried to cheer her. The tears of women, the theme song of our time. She was a Jewess and was going back to Prague and she didn't want to, and she envied her sister who was comfortably married in England, farther away from the bombs.
Then, in the airport bus, we drove and drove, for hours as it seemed. London was a dead city of shuttered and blinded shops, as if people with closed eyes lined the route; once again, by some chance, I was leaving England on a bank holiday. For those of you who don't know England I'll explain that in England they call public holidays bank holidays, and there's a moral somewhere in that, if you can find it.
On we went and on and on, and just as I saw a green field and rubbed my eyes the bus turned off to the right and I wandered through a draughty hall with a bookstall that said to me, 'Good morning, have you read Insanity Fair?' and then the engines were roaring in my ears and the smell of petrol was in my nostrils and I felt myself again a cub lieutenant in the Air Force in France and the next moment England lay beneath me.
England. I urged you to take a look at London with open eyes, to see what manner of men are having their hair oiled and their hands manicured in the marble basements of Piccadilly, what sort of people are expensively cultivating their dyspepsia in the foreign restaurants between Soho and the Green Park, what kind of citizens live around Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Street, Shaftesbury Avenue and Leicester Square, what breed of human beings conduct your picture theatres, your nude revues, your bottle parties, your slot-machine orgies, your brothels, your poached-egg-on-chips palaces.
Now take a look at England from the air. Contemplate the leprous and scabrous landscape where once all was greensward and pleasaunce, if you can believe your poets, your painters and your prints.
London sprawled endlessly behind me, featureless, meaningless, random and unplanned. Even from the air you could not see the end of it. Beyond that turgid mass lay blobs, the 'estates' and 'parks' of the merchant adventurer of 1938, the jerrybuilder, as if the great splash that was London had cast a few drops farther afield. Everywhere were the scars of the builder, newly made or not yet healed. As we drew clear of the last outcrops I saw great footprints all over the countryside: a giant had been walking about England while England was wet. These were the bunkers of the golf courses.
Here and there were the rare signs of health, the good green and brown of growing crops and ploughed fields, but everywhere they were threatened by the nondescript grey of uncultivated land, of waste acres, of no-trespass areas, of unkempt woodland.
Trains seemed to be running along the roads; but as I peered closer I saw that they were motor-cars in endless procession, moving slowly towards the delights of Margate and Ramsgate, and as the great wing of the aeroplane slowly cleared the coast and a strip of blue appeared behind it, I saw thousands upon thousands of ants, all jumbled up together, crawling about those sands. London was making merry, London was having its day at the seaside.
I turned and looked out to starboard and saw with a feeling of wonderment that the wing of the aeroplane had hardly cleared Dover before the French coast appeared beneath it. The strip of water between the two was so narrow that there seemed barely room for the little steamer that was just passing between them. For the ants down there on the sands France and the French were things almost as far away and as foreign as the moon. From up here you felt that you could lean down and join them with a piece of stamp-paper.
Then I turned again and looked out to port and had another shock. The French and English coasts fell away so steeply that from this side I could see neither of them. Strange atmospheric conditions prevailed. A cloudless blue sky and a motionless blue sea were mated by a blue haze that raped the horizon. You could not see where sea left off and sky began, what was sky and what sea. They were all one. There was nothing, above, below, around, but a blue something. Nothing to measure height by. Nothing to measure movement by. Nothing but blue, and the roar of the engines to say that we were living beings still belonging to a world that had vanished. Nothing but that blue and a golden sparkle in it that you could not locate, but which told you that the sun, somewhere, was finding something in that blue emptiness and gilding it.
A man could go mad if he set himself to think about that endless emptiness, inexplicably coloured blue. Think of it as a coloured glass bowl, as most of you do, and you are all right; 'the blue vault of heaven' is a warm and comforting conception. Take away the glass bowl, try to apply your human understanding to the infinite, and you need to hold your scalp on. And why blue, anyway? Not what is to come after worries me, as it seems to worry so many people, but what was before. In the beginning was ... well, all right, if that satisfies you. But before the beginning, you had to have space, and who put space there?
As I hung there, an infinitesimal fly on an endless blue wall, I thought of these things until it hurt. On my left - this. On my right - Margate. Hurriedly I took a last look at that stupendous, beloved, terrifying blue and sought refuge in my morning paper. When I looked again the sun, groping through the haze, had picked up a faint white filament that was the sands of the Dutch coast, and I was glad.
Rotterdam. Ships in the trim and busy harbour. A fine green field. Bright and cheery citizens, come out to watch the air-liners come and go. A cup of coffee. The roar of engines again.
The wing of the machine slid slowly across the frontier and I was looking at Germany once more. Germany, that is always with us, the men of my generation, and seemingly will stay with us from the cradle to the grave. In my childhood all the talk had been of warlike Germany and her plans to destroy England. I had spent my younger manhood fighting against Germany for four years and had had a German bullet in my leg. In my later manhood I had spent seven years in Germany, and after that I had spent three years in the other Germany, Austria, and seen German armies come roaring in again. Now I was going to Czechoslovakia and soon, I knew, I should see the German armies there. After that, I also knew, I should see them in other places. As long as I lived they would give the world no rest, unless the world chose to capitulate before them. I wondered whether, given the choice, I would choose another time to live in. I answered, No - I can't say why.
Slowly and smoothly an invisible hand drew a flat and lifeless map beneath me, a harmless, amusing thing of browns and greens and yellows, with towns and roads and railways hatched upon it, and after two and a half hours it was gone. Could this, I asked myself, be the country before which all the world quailed, this coloured inanimate sheet with its toylike towns and no sign of life save tiny puffs of smoke from stations and factories? This big field across which you could fly in an hour or two? Could this page out of an atlas be the thing that continually formed and reformed all my life, that repeatedly changed all my plans, that from my nineteenth to my forty-third year had always intervened when I thought to map out the route of my future, and seemed likely for the rest of my days to intrude between myself and the places where I wanted to live, the things I wanted to do?
From the height at which we flew - at which we had to fly, for Hitler was at work night and day on his concrete retort to the Maginot Line, and foreign air-liners had been warned to keep above 10,000 feet - all that ant-like activity had become invisible to the human eye. But I knew that down there, while France was busy with her eternal cabinet crises and England was languidly discussing whether she ought to make some kind of preparations for defence against air raids, down there Hitler could with a stroke of the pen take a million men overnight from their daily occupations and set them to work building fortifications, that those tiny puffs of smoke, in all that placid map the only signs of human activity that reached up to where I was, meant that a greater air fleet, mightier legions of tanks and artillery than the world has ever seen were being built.
The contrast with the face of England was immense. Here the ploughman, the sower of seed and the woodsman had etched the land in oblongs and squares and triangles of green and brown and gold. On every inch of it something grew to feed man or serve him, save where the towns lay, and they were orderly settlements, built to plan. Their suburban outgrowths picked their way cleanly and carefully into the surrounding countryside. No scars, no scabs, no blots and blobs. Everything tidied up and left trim and shipshape.
At last the aeroplane crossed the Czechoslovak frontier and I reflected, as I had often reflected before, that the German air fleets of 1938 needed about a quarter of an hour to reach Prague. While I was still thinking about this, Prague appeared beneath us, and a few minutes later I was bowling into the city in the airport bus, glad to be back and full of curiosity to learn how Benesh and his people, whom I had last seen in January, were bearing the strain now that Austria was gone and the battering ram of Germany's urge to expand had slewed round from Vienna and was pointing menacingly at Prague.
I was astounded by the spirit and tranquil resolution of the Czechoslovaks in those early summer days. I admired them, but I feared for them. They thought that, outnumbered ten or twelve to one, they could resist for days or even weeks. After what I had seen in Austria I did not believe it. They thought France, England and Russia would come to their aid if they could hold out a little while. After what I had seen of British policy in the five years since Hitler came to power I did not believe it.
I thought they would be deserted at the last moment, and had said so in Insanity Fair and in articles I wrote many months before. Here was a little country faced by the imminent threat of brute force, and British policy all over the world in recent years, in China, in Abyssinia, in Spain, in Austria, had been to retreat before the aggressors, even to help them to their successes. I did not believe that this policy would be changed in the case of Czechoslovakia. On the contrary, I thought that it would be pursued even to the capitulation of England herself, and I think you will see this.
So, once more, I walked about a great city feeling like the one-eyed man in the country of the blind and with compassion in my heart for these people who so stoutly turned their faces to the future. If they had been despondent and overawed I should have found it easier to bear. But, in spite of all that had happened in the world, they still had their faith, they still believed in the victory of that cause for which the World War was said to have been fought - the right of small nations to live their own lives. The thought of the shock that this faith was going to receive overclouded those glorious June days, for me.
Just before I left London, in May, I had given a cocktail party and among the people who came to it was the managing director of a Prague newspaper. He asked me if I thought there would be war, and I said no, Czechoslovakia would disintegrate without war because she would be faced with the threat of overwhelming force and would be deserted by those who alone could help her to resist it. He thought this a wild opinion and said that, even if deserted, the Czechoslovak army would never retire without fighting; he had not seen, as I had, the growth of the new German army, and its first employment, in Austria. When he returned to Prague he looked up all the reference books and told me triumphantly, when I saw him there in June, that frontiers had never in history been substantially altered without war. When I saw him in October he said to me, 'You are a prophet.'
Who wants to be a prophet?
I was glad to have had those summer days in Prague. I felt that I should not often see that Prague again. The more I see of it the more I come to think that Prague is one of the loveliest of all the cities I know. It has not the incomparable surroundings of Vienna, it has not the peerless river front of Budapest. But the Hradschin, with St. Vitus's Cathedral, dominating the city; the Moldau curving by beneath its ancient Charles Bridge; the lovely old winding streets and houses, still unspoiled; the narrow alley where the alchemists sought the secret of making gold; the ironworkers and woodworkers and leatherworkers and glassworkers, almost the last craftsmen in Europe; all these combine to make a city of inexhaustible beauty. I never take a walk in Prague without the pleasant feeling that I have a minor adventure before me.
The city was packed with young men and girls in the loveliest peasant costumes that Europe can show or in the dress of the Sokols. Long ago, about the middle of last century, when Czechoslovak independence seemed but a vain and distant dream, these Sokol gymnastic societies were founded to keep alive the idea of nationhood under the rule of the Austrian Emperors. When the World War came the young men who had trained and hardened their bodies in the ranks of the Sokols formed those fine Czechoslovak Legions which fought with the French, the Russian, the Italian armies against the Central Powers. After the war they came back and built the army of the Czechoslovak Republic, that army which now, in June 1938, was standing on guard at the frontiers.
The Sokol rallies, displays of gymnastics and physical exercises on a stupendous scale, were great events in liberated Czechoslovakia and united Yugoslavia after the war. They were held every six years and chance had ordained that the greatest of all was held in this fateful summer of 1938, in the big stadium outside Prague named after the President-Liberator, that Thomas Garrigue Masaryk behind whose coffin I had walked only a few months earlier.
It was an unforgettable pageant of Slav costume, colour, music and physical fitness, that mass rally in the Masaryk Stadium, with mortal danger overhanging the city. The young men and girls you saw in Prague in their red and grey uniforms, with the falcon's feather in their caps, were the living proofs of the progress that the free Czechoslovak Republic had made in nineteen years.
Its twentieth birthday, on October 28th, was at hand, and these people confidently looked forward to it. Prague might be in ruins, they knew, and they calmly accepted that thought. The one thing they did not foresee was that Prague might be a vassal city, reduced without a fight.
As I strolled down the Wenceslas Platz I saw an old lady in peasant costume with odds and ends of embroidery in her basket, lovely things among them. I had sometimes bought from her on earlier visits. Now I saw that she had in her basket printed coloured handkerchiefs, produced to commemorate the coming twentieth anniversary of Czechoslovakia's independence. There was a map of Czechoslovakia printed in bright colours on the silk; around the map pictures of Czechoslovak infantrymen and aircraft and cannon and tanks; beneath it Masaryk's motto, 'Truth prevails'; in the top left-hand corner '1918' and in the bottom right-hand corner '1938'.
This was June. Not quite five months until October 28th. If things were going the way I expected, Czechoslovakia would never celebrate that birthday, and this handkerchief would make a useful addition to the little collection of memory-laden things I have picked up on my travels and surround myself with whenever I have the luck to be able to make myself a home somewhere for a month or two.
I bought it. The old lady remembered me and smiled a greeting. I told her I should be frequently in Prague during the summer. But then I think she fell ill for a time and I did not see her any more. When I did encounter her again in the Wenceslas Platz my handkerchief had become a historical curiosity, and, although it was not yet October 28th, she had no more of them in her basket. She no longer smiled. She looked older and careworn.
Count X was tall, of good physique, easy-mannered. He sat among his pictures and treasures and acres and complained incessantly. He had all the wealth and land that a reasonable man could want, I thought, as I sipped the vermouth which an obsequious serving man brought at his master's call. But far away, beyond the reach of the naked eye from the great baroque mansion, were other fields that had been taken from him, against compensation, when the Czechoslovak Republic was formed, and given to the landless peasants, those serfs who had lived for centuries without rights or land or liberties under the rule of German or Hungarian noblemen until the War Called Great freed them.
Hewers of wood and drawers of water for the German and Magyar magnates they had been until then. They were not even the bondmen of tyrants of their own blood. The Czech nobles had been exterminated by the German armies at the Battle of the White Mountain, near Prague, three centuries before, when three-quarters of the Czechs were killed or driven from Bohemia, when Catholic nobles came in from Austria, and confiscated the lands of the dead Czech aristocrats.
Count X had never forgotten or forgiven the loss of his distant fields, never been able to look without loathing across to those distant acres where a few Czech peasants were now wringing a scanty living, as freemen, from their native soil. Until Austria collapsed he, like nearly all the other landed nobles in Czechoslovakia, had longed for the return of the Emperor to Vienna, hoped for Czechoslovakia's return to the fold of the Habsburg Empire. Now that Austria was no more, and the Reich had declared young Otto, vegetating in Steenockerzeel, to be an outcast and criminal, he had given up that hope and was for Hitler.
Bear in mind that the rich men in all countries are helpers of Hitler, and you will understand a good deal of what has happened in Europe. You never found rich and titled Englishmen, in any number, ostentatiously visiting Prague in the twenty years of that free Republic.
You did not find them rallying to the cause of Czechoslovakia when that little land of freemen was confronted with the threat of extermination. You will find their names at the foot of many documents signed, during these twenty years, to demand 'justice for Hungary' - where millions of peasants, to-day, are landless serfs. You could have seen them, in large numbers, at Hitler's dinner table, at the Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg. You will see their names beneath letters in the newspapers appealing for 'a fair deal' for Germany, for 'magnanimity for German', for 'a better understanding with Germany'.
Bear in mind that the rich landed noblemen of East Prussia brought Hitler to power. Some people say they regret it now that they are being progressively squeezed out of their estates, deprived of their power, shorn of their lands. I am sceptical. The rich men in other countries would not so surely plump for Hitler, if it were so.
Count X languidly but incessantly complained, as he sat among his collections and books and looked out through the windows to his smiling acres, and the servile and slippered steward brought us vermouth. He had a new grievance. The Czechoslovak army was mobilized. The defences were manned, from the inner ring round Prague to the first line at the frontier. The air squadrons, to throw enemy bombers off the scent, had left their home landing-grounds and were standing on open fields, ready at a moment's notice to take to the air.
One squadron of bombers and fighters was lying behind the tall trees that fringed his park. Some of the officers and men were billeted in a remote wing of his mansion. In the old clock tower on the roof two soldiers sat day and night and kept watch on the northern sky. This annoyed him.
Muttering complaints, he led me through a long corridor to that distant wing where he had had to give up a few unused rooms. He had had chests and cupboards built, barricade-like, across it to shut out the unwelcome sight of his visitors. We squeezed through, and visited the Czechoslovak soldiers. They saw Count X coming, jumped to their feet, saluted him, gave smiling answers to his genial questions. How genial he was, suddenly. One good Czechoslovak to another.
We went out through the park, saw through the foliage of the tall trees the aeroplanes hiding, bombs and machine-guns ready. Officers and soldiers, stripped to the waist, lay in the grass under the warm sun, lazily waiting. Their commander jumped up, clicked his heels in greeting, cordially but respectfully welcomed the German lord of this Czech manor. Big, blond, well-built, simple, honest fellows, ready, ardently ready, to go and fight Goliath. Count X was all smiles and geniality.
We went on. Count X grumbled. Behind some bushes the soldiers had built a field lavatory. In their visits to it they had trodden flat a narrow path through the rank grass, uncut these hundreds of years. Count X complained. A peacock screamed, stalked across the path in front of us. The sun blazed through the leaves and gnats danced in the dusty beams.
I left Count X to his complaints and drove over to his neighbour Count Y. On the way I talked with my chauffeur. A quiet fellow who weighed every word, who kept himself decent and worked hard for a frugal living. He was diligently learning English, the better to ply his trade. He had no complaints. He was filled with a quiet exaltation. He was partly German, but he was a loyal Czechoslovak to the core. He was a working man and knew what the free Republic meant. Count X had looked down on him with suspicion from one of the windows and said gloomily, 'I suppose your chauffeur will report in Prague that you have been to see me.'
As he drove me across that lovely countryside -- the loveliest lands for me are those where good crops are growing, growing, and men and women work in the fields from dawn to dusk -- Jan Czech, my chauffeur, spoke with quiet fervour of the mobilization. The world had not thought the Czechs had it in them, he said, but the Czechs had known. Late on that Friday night the postmen had gone racing round with the mobilization notices, he said, and by dawn on Saturday the frontier defences were manned, the men had gone with joy in their hearts to defend their country. He had not yet been called on, he said, but when the word came he and every man he knew would go by the quickest way they could find to fight for this State. Germany could not take them by surprise now, swallow them at one gulp as she had swallowed Austria. His mother was a German, and he had relatives up there in the German frontier districts. But he was a Czechoslovak and, he said quietly, his life was of no value. Czechoslovakia must live.
As we drove to Count Y, I saw the signs of that lightning mobilization, that astonished military experts the world over. Compare it with the utter confusion that reigned in England in that September week when war seemed at hand. Here I saw, hiding behind a farmhouse wall, the great tin ear-trumpets of the listening machines, behind another the glistening eyes of the searchlights, alongside a hedge the muzzles of the anti-aircraft guns, in fields the bombers and fighters waiting ready to spring, on bridges the newly dug holes with the dynamite fuses and soldiers lounging by them, ready to touch them off. All got ready in a night.
Count Y was sitting on his terrace and I had a late breakfast with him, drank coffee, ate toast and marmalade and listened to his tale. He, too, had lost some distant acres; he, too, had awakened that Saturday morning to find the aeroplanes squatting on his fields. But no soldiers had been billeted on him, so that he was feeling better than Count X. Count Y also had the misfortune to have a little Jewish blood in him, so that the course of his political allegiance lay less clearly before him than before Count X. But he shared with his neighbour the lack of feeling for the Czechoslovak state, a feeling that seemed to diminish as your property and wealth grew, unless you happened to be a Czech, and this was rare, because the relatively few very rich people in the Czechoslovak state were nearly all Germans or Hungarians or Jews.
I left him, and drove on to the German-populated districts and the frontier. The flat Czech plain, where the peasants worked so hard for a frugal return, where the Czechoslovak state had done such wonders in building roads and schools and hospitals in these twenty years, gave way to the lovely mountains where the Germans live. You only had to travel this road to see why the Czechoslovaks could not give up the Sudeten lands and remain independent. It was like a walled city; give up the walls, and how could you defend what lay within?
In Reichenberg, where once, only three-years before, I had seen Nadya dancing and found a quiet town full of contented people, were all the signs of things to come that I knew from the last days of Austria. Hitlerist uniforms and badges were forbidden, but the young Nazis knew the way to get round these bans. The young men wore white stockings and shorts, the girls Dirndl dresses, and all saluted each other with the upraised arm and 'Heil', leaving out the Hitler for the time being. The word had been passed round that 'He' was coming soon.
I sat on the balcony of the hotel in the market square and drank coffee with Jan Czech, who insisted on paying for his own. The waiter, the guests, looked askance at us. Here everybody knew everybody, there was a grape-vine system of unspoken inter-communication between the Germans that you could feel like a living thing. They knew that we did not belong, they had seen the Prague number plate on our car.
On the car, too, was a token from the Sokol Congress in Prague, and the Nazis hated the Sokols. Outwardly orderly, they were already working on the nerves of the Czech minority, in the manner they have perfected by practice in Germany and Austria, with dark hints of what was to come, of concentration camps and beatings and vengeance generally.
Jan Czech took no notice at all of these things. Unruffled, he looked down from the balcony, and seemed not to see the hostile and menacing glances, the muttered words exchanged. Only once did they succeed in stinging him. We were looking for the British Consulate and, stopping the car, he asked a woman politely and in perfect German if she could tell him the way. 'British Consulate?' she answered challengingly. 'No, but I can tell you where the German Consulate is if you like.'
Jan Czech slipped in the clutch and drove on, a little red in the face. 'Ach, ja, Deutsch,' he muttered, and then his lips closed again and his face regained its resolute serenity. I saw that same expression on the face of the Czech policeman, quietly directing the traffic, on the faces of the few Czech officers and soldiers, lonely men in a hostile town, who were in the streets.
Then we drove on, through one German village after another, to the frontier. The Nazis, who had been making trouble everywhere in order to give the pretext for German intervention, and had in the streets been spitting at Czech officers who had been ordered at all costs to avoid clashes, had been abruptly checked by the mobilization. They saw now that intervention would mean heavy fighting in their own country. They were perfectly orderly.
In all that drive I saw only a handful of troops, and yet the frontier defences were fully manned and ready. At a spot where the road fell steeply on one side and rose steeply on the other, so that tanks or mechanized divisions could not make a detour, the road was mined and through the trees you could see two or three soldiers, with a little tent, smoking and talking as they waited for the order. Near the frontier, concrete barriers had been built across the road, to check the progress of tanks. Sometimes, in a field of growing corn, you saw the humped back of a concrete machine-gun post, with a solitary Czech soldier watching your car through field-glasses to see if you were taking photographs. At the frontier itself two or three Czech gendarmes and customs officials, stranded out here in a hostile countryside, far from their fellows.
Down the road, a kilometre distant, I saw, for the first time since they marched into Austria, the Germans. Little toylike figures in the distance, standing about the customs barrier in the sunshine. All around, placid, abundant, sunlit fields, with peasants working in them. Beyond, rolling, well-tended hills, with not a hint of menace in them - Germany.
I drove back to Prague with Jan Czech. That evening I ate at Manes, on the wooden veranda, with its coloured lights, overhanging the Moldau. Music, and coloured spirals in the water. A crescent moon over the Hradschin. In all Europe that I have seen I know of no lovelier place to dine. All around me young and carefree people or quiet and solid elders enjoying an evening meal in this fresh air, at once cool and warm.
As I sat there white fingers stabbed into the sky and probed about and fastened together upon a glittering moth that came humming down along the Moldau. They held it and held it and then let go and it vanished into the night. Half an hour later it came again, and again they groped about for it and found it and followed it and let it go, and a third time, and a fourth.
It was the symbol of the menace that hung over Prague. I watched it and then turned and watched the people round me. They raised their heads from their conversation and looked at it, gravely, without fear or surprise, then turned back to each other, made some quiet remark, and began to eat again. They were unafraid and calm. I sat as long as I could, until the last of the guests had gone, watching the moon fall behind the Hradschin, the lights go out and the water darken.
In the outer office I spoke again to the official who spoke perfect English. He had fought with the British armies, as the Legionaries outside had fought with the French, the Italian, the Russian armies.
Inside was Benesh, earnest, honest, hard-working, truthful as ever, the man who was to miss the good ship Success, that fine new liner in which all the best people travel nowadays, and stand forlornly on the quayside waiting for the old tub Honour, which has long since been laid up. He came to shake hands, with the silken and satin Habsburgs watching in the background, those Habsburgs who were Kings of Bohemia as well as Emperors of Austria and Kings of Hungary and this and that, until Masaryk and Benesh took their places in 1918, and we walked over to the windows to look at the city spread-below.
We turned and sat down, and as Benesh talked, laboriously picking out the phrases from the English he had taught himself, I looked back along the years and then into the future and felt my heart heavy for this man and his State. Not yet twenty years since Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, with his devoted American wife, and Eduard Benesh, exiles triumphant, had proclaimed Czechoslovakia an independent state, amid the thunderous plaudits of the Allies, at Washington and returned to Prague to take over the country that those allies had set free. Now Benesh sat before me, his eyes earnestly fixed on mine, and once more professed confidence in the future, against all the overwhelming odds of 1938.
I have just read a book by somebody who says it is a good thing for journalists that the things they wrote yesterday are soon forgotten, that their mistakes and their false forecasts are buried in the yellowing flies. I happen to know that if the forecasts, not only of experienced journalists but also of experienced diplomats and professional students of foreign affairs, had been believed, and the policies they advocated pursued, Europe and the world would not be in the plight they are to-day. Given the determination to amend just grievances, but also the determination to mobilize overwhelming force against any attempt to remedy these grievances or to subjugate small nations by force, you could have had peace in Europe now and for long to come, and your journalists, your diplomats and your students could in 1933 have told you, and did tell you, just what was coming in 1938 and what to do about it.
For my part, I like to read, with the eye of the craftsman, an article I wrote which was published in the New York World on May 28th, 1938. These are extracts from it:
Benesh holds the stage: the spotlight of history is full on him ... He is the next prey of the dictators ... Already the end of free Czechoslovakia is at hand. Isolated, remote from apprehensive allies and lukewarm friends, held like a nut in the grip of the mighty German nut-crackers -- look at the map -- Benesh has only the choice of two evils left to him twenty years after the liberation of his countrymen from German (Austro-German) rule. Either he may try and save something from the wreck of Czechoslovak independence and capitulate to all the German demands, cancel his French and Soviet alliances, become completely subservient to German orders, make arms and munitions for Germany - and possibly be allowed to remain as vassal President of a little rump Czechoslovakia bound slavelike to the chariot of the German conquerors. Or the Germans will march in, Czechoslovakia will disappear entirely, Czechs and Slovaks will form labour battalions for the German army in a new European war, the efficient Czech aircraft and armaments industry will be swallowed up by the already mighty German military machine. There is no other choice, in 1938. I saw the invasion of Austria and do not now believe that the Czechs, brave and efficient as they are, could resist this enormous might for long enough to shame France or England or Russia into intervention.Of all sad things of tongue or pen, the saddest is this. I told you so. It is as comfortless as a bad cheque, as cheerless as an empty grate in winter. But as a last word on behalf of a hard-working class of men, the British newspaper correspondents who told you for years what was coming, I want to say it.
France has sworn to come to the aid of Czechoslovakia if she be attacked. But will France? Can France?
England longs to keep out, and only dreads that France may intervene. One of her junior Ministers, on the morrow of the German invasion, practically invited Hitler to take Czechoslovakia.
Benesh's tragic destiny is written in his face. His neighbour, Kurt von Schuschnigg, crying 'God Save Austria' into the radio as his last words to his countrymen, has disappeared into captivity. The spotlight relentlessly swivels from Vienna to Prague, probes the windows of the Hradschin, fixes on Benesh, as he sits at his desk among the painted Habsburgs ... His is the tragedy of the man who put all his eggs in one basket - that of loyalty. Europe is full of slick premiers who make up to the dictatorships while blandly professing that this in no way diminishes their loyalty to their old friends ... Benesh is impatient of such methods. They are dishonest, he says, and mean that in the long run everybody will be let down. His policy, and Masaryk's, was that of friendship and collaboration with the countries that had befriended Czechoslovakia and helped to liberate her: of collective resistance, with them, to aggression.
He will follow that policy, he has told me, to the end. If he is wanted. But if he is not wanted ... why, then, he would make terms with Germany and Czechoslovakia would go all the way with her. But he must know. He must know.
But they will never tell him. They will leave him there, caught in the jaws of the German pincers, to seek his own salvation, and if he can at this last moment save something by coming to terms with Germany, which I doubt, he would be wise to do it.
We shall probably not be allowed to tell you much longer. It was our job to study foreign countries, to inform you about them, to tell you what they meant to you, what their future actions would be. Doing our job, we have come to be people 'who foul their own nests', doubting Thomases, irritating scribblers who make relationships with the dictatorships difficult, and soon we may be suppressed.
The people who know better, not from knowledge but from intuition or divine revelation, will be freed from this encumbrance. Lord Halifax has spoken of the British distrust of people who claim to know too clearly what is going to happen.
Why have specialists? Why have experts? There is a post vacant in the cabinet, the Ministry of Antarctic Exploration. Give it to old Sebastian Broadacres, who has spent 'a lifetime in the service of his country'; he was at Eton and Balliol, he served a term as ensign in the guards and was honorary attaché for three years in the Legation at Sofia, he was a member of the Governor-General's staff in New Zealand and has sat for two decades as member for Oblivion-in-the-fields, he did awfully well as British Commissioner during that plebiscite in Bechuanaland and is now Chairman of the Artificial Ice Trust, the very man. And that reminds me, I must say a sharp word to the Editor of the Antarctic Gazette about that carping fellow who claims to have spent years in Antarctica and keeps on writing those annoyingly critical articles.
These were the kind of thoughts that kept fluttering round, bats-in-the-belfry-like, as I sat and listened to Benesh. Two unimportant little men, of rather similar origins, for we had both acquired our positions, in their vastly different spheres, by hard work and the laborious acquirement of knowledge, not by inheritance. This was especially bad for Benesh. He would have done better, in a class-ridden world, to be born Graf Benesh with an estate in Transylvania. For my part, if I were to have any regrets, they would be that I did not somehow contrive to become a painter or musician, a doctor or possibly an engineer, because you could then close your mind to our contemporary times and yet put your feelings for humanity on to paper or canvas, into your work for your patients or into a big bridge. But for a British journalist, dearly as I love my craft, the day seems to be drawing to its end.
I fixed a picture of Benesh in my mind, as I saw him that day, with the bewigged Habsburgs behind him. He showed his working-class and peasant origin. He was rather short, his features were commonplace, but his eyes and expression, his carefully chosen words and the manner of speaking them all told of an honest purpose and a clean character. I have seen many men in high positions, and know how to judge them. He was healthy, in mind and body, untheatrical, hard-working, full of energy. He had, unless I was deceived this time, faith. He still believed in the victory of justice, in Masaryk's motto, 'The truth prevails'. In spite of everything, he still believed.
Why did he not rat, in the age of the rat, when ratting is foreign policy, when everybody's doing it now? I am not even sure whether it would have been ratting. Perhaps he owed it to his country-people to change his policy, and not, in 1938, to continue steadfastly in pursuit of the mirage honour. For years he had been urged from many quarters -- not from France and England -- that he was on the wrong tack, that he would be let down, that he should make his terms with Germany. His Little Entente associates urged him repeatedly to do this. In Yugoslavia Prince Regent Paul and his Prime Minister, Milan Stoyadinovitch, had seen the red light two years earlier, when the French passively accepted the German seizure of the demilitarized Rhineland zone and therewith the closure of their only path of succour to Czechoslovakia. From that day on, anxious voices from Belgrade had continually urged him to make friends with Germany at all costs. 'Do it now,' they said, 'or France will let you down.'
Benesh would not. He thought that this was treachery, that these were untrustworthy allies who gave such advice. He anchored his hopes to France and England, to that magnificent principle of collective resistance to an aggressor that England had betrayed in Abyssinia. He could have hitched his Czechoslovak wagon to the German star on good terms, and would not. He was wrong, bitterly wrong. He should have done this.
I had seen him last in December 1937. For three and a half hours he had earnestly explained his motives and intentions in that painstaking English, and as he is now gone from the political scene I think I can repeat some of the things he said. This conversation seemed to me of such historical importance -- I was already convinced that Czechoslovakia's fate was sealed -- that I took a shorthand note of it and still have the account, word for word.
The whole burden of his tale was that he would not and could not change his policy unless France and England told him that they did not want him, that they regarded Czechoslovakia as a liability rather than an asset. Repeatedly he said, 'I must know, I must know.'
Read these words:
If Germany takes the question of minorities as a pretext for attacking Czechoslovakia, where they are better treated than in Poland, Hungary or Italy, for instance, British opinion must understand that this is done, not because the situation of the minorities is bad in this country, but because we have not been submissive to German foreign policy in general and have resisted.So spoken by Benesh, and noted by me, on the evening of December 19th, 1937. Before, long before, the seizure of Austria.
I could also very easily make peace with Germany if I had cared to make the same equivocal policy as Monsieur X or Monsieur Y. I could make the same peace as Monsieur Z has made with Italy, if I wished to accept German influence in our general foreign policy.
All this German campaign against us -- if only this could be understood in England -- is not on account of the German minority and its treatment, but because Germany thinks she can force us to adopt a different foreign policy - to abandon France, England, collaboration with Western Europe, and to submit to German influence.
I put this question to every British citizen, especially to British politicians:
Do you think that we should continue to maintain this extremely important geographical position in Central Europe for a general European policy and for the maintenance of peace and democracy, or should we abandon it and yield to German pressure and accept German influence?
Yes or No?
Is that a matter of importance to Great Britain or not?
I don't ask the help of England or France against a German attack, because I can't ask for help on my own account. I understand that every country must defend its interests. I understand that Czechoslovakia is not imprinted on the hearts of British citizens. They do not know where Czechoslovakia is.
I understand that perfectly.
But I say, if to-morrow this position which we have here and are maintaining should have to be abandoned; if Germany 'becomes again the master of this country directly or indirectly -- because we shall be probably independent but under German influence, as Austria will be, as Hungary will be -- what will happen after that to the interests of England and France?
I say that the international position of this country is of the greatest importance for Western Europe. I know very well that England does not like to undertake commitments in a part of Central Europe which is not understood by the man in the street.
But I am convinced that if we abandon this position and if we do not resist the influence and pressure of Germany we shall in a few years have war again - not against us, but against France and England, as we did in 1914. Czechoslovakia would have to fight again for Germany, as in 1914 for Austria.
My conclusion from this is not that England must come to the help of Czechoslovakia, but that England has the greatest interest to maintain the status quo and the present situation in Central Europe. I have never asked for a treaty with England. I have never asked help from England. I always accepted the point of view of England, that we must proceed in such a general way that we should not give a pretext that would enable us to be accused of provoking a war.
But on the other hand I ask from England comprehension, understanding of the situation here, in the sense that if we are destroyed the history of 1914, in one form or another, will repeat itself.
Just as in 1914 Germany, through Austria and Turkey, menaced the Mediterranean and the route to India, so will it come again.
Therefore I say that Prague and Czechoslovakia form one of the most important geographical situations in Europe. If we are abandoned by Western Europe we can do nothing else than make an agreement with Germany.
England should understand that I do not wish to be hostile to Germany. We wish to agree with Germany. But we wish to do so together with France and England.
I wish not to abandon, in this fight for general peace in Europe, France and England. I wish to do it together with them because I think that peace can only be durable if made in this way.
If, on the other hand, I am obliged to make a bilateral treaty with Germany, entirely independent from England and France, that means that Germany is master of the whole of Central Europe.
The consequences of a British policy of disinterestedness in Central Europe would be really disastrous for Europe, in my opinion.
Germany wishes to force us to change our policy, to abandon Western Europe, and to bring the whole of Central Europe under German influence, in order to fight for the colonial question, in order to prepare its new world situation. Germany thinks that when she has broken completely the resistance of these small states, Austria and Czechoslovakia, everything will be at her mercy.
She does not wish to make war. When she has the whole of Central Europe under her influence she will be in a far better position towards the Great Powers and the same policy will begin again as in 1914 - Atlantic and Mediterranean, colonial question, rivalry of the Great Powers.
One object of the World War was to establish in Central Europe independent states in order to give them exactly the same position as Belgium and Holland, to prevent the small states from becoming the instruments of Germany. If England is not disinterested in Central Europe this means that England will help us to maintain our independence and to fulfil this mission of the little states in Central Europe, to help to maintain peace.
If we are put again under the direct or indirect influence of Germany we shall be exploited against the other Great Powers.
I repeat again - I am not anti-German. We do not wish to make an anti-German policy. I do not wish to be the instrument of another power against Germany. I wish to maintain my own independence and liberty. I wish to collaborate with Germany. I recognize that Germany, being in the neighbourhood of Central Europe, has great economic and other interests in Central Europe.
But I do say that Germany is not the only state which has interests in Central Europe, that other states like England and France have also interests, and therefore I wish that the negotiations of the states simply give to every great power in Central Europe its real place.
Germany has only one aim - to put Czechoslovakia in a position of complete neutrality in any European conflict. Germany would give us every imaginable guarantee to-morrow in exchange for that. I put the question - if this is so, what is the point of view of the French and British Cabinets?
In practice this would mean that in any war Czechoslovakia would be obliged, not to remain neutral, but to help Germany. I have told Hitler: 'I am prepared to make a treaty with you but if I negotiate with you I shall immediately inform the Cabinets of Paris and London.'
Germany is manoeuvring our German minority in order to force us to change our international policy. We are in our view contributing in an extraordinary degree to the general peace by resisting German pressure and maintaining democracy here and by preparing in collaboration with England and France to save all Europe.
But if the loyalty of Czechoslovakia to France and England is regarded by certain quarters in England as something that may be an obstacle to a general agreement, that is a complete misunderstanding of the whole Czechoslovak policy, and would have to be considered by Prague as a completely hopeless situation.
Czechoslovakia would be forced to realize that she is completely misunderstood, that Great Britain does not appreciate the contribution she is making to general peace, and that she is being pushed to a policy which would force her one day to go into the arms of Germany and against England.
It is a tragic misunderstanding.
Again I say, if you think that we are of no use in maintaining this extraordinarily important geographical position in Central Europe, on which all European peace rests, that means that finally our interests will be to agree with Germany and to go with her in all German conquests.
We are at the crucial point in the negotiations of Europe. We must choose. I must know what France and England want. If France and England wish that Czechoslovakia, as the last democracy in Central Europe, should separate herself from them, they must tell us.
Then we shall know what to do.
That is the point.
As I went down the hill that night, into a damp and foggy Prague, I thought drearily to myself, 'They will never tell him. They will lead him to think that they stand with and for Czechoslovakia, that he is right in fighting for his democracy, right in resisting Germany, right in adhering staunchly to the system of collective resistance to aggression that they themselves devised. Then, when he is face to face with the German army, they will leave him to it.'
That was what I thought, that December evening, and that was why I wrote as much in an American newspaper in May 1938, and why I wrote, in Insanity Fair, 'Czechoslovakia is finished - for us. You will see this, and soon.'
I never had a heavier heart than when I wrote those words, for I saw in my mind's eye a prophetic picture - homeless refugees huddling in unheated huts, terror-stricken women and children trailing along wet roads, despairing people weeping in the streets of Prague. The reverse of that shining golden medal, peace with honour.
On this sunny June day I took leave of Benesh again, shook his firm hand, received the usual warm invitation to come again, any time. I knew I should never come again to see him in the Hradschin. I went down the hill and said good-bye to Prague. The streets were full of cheery and smiling people. At the frontiers stood their fathers, sons and brothers. They did not mind: they were prepared to perish, so that Czechoslovakia might survive, truth prevail.
When I next came to Prague Benesh was a broken man. A few days after my arrival I saw him, almost alone, driving to the airport to leave his country. As I write he lives in a villa in Putney.
I meant at first to call this chapter 'A man of no importance'. On second thoughts I altered it to 'Portrait of a Gentleman'. In our time these are coming to be interchangeable phrases.
Incidentally, the question whether Benesh 'was right or wrong', from the point of view of his own country, of Europe, and of a wider humanity, is one to which the answer cannot yet be given; in a year or two you will know it.
I was too sure in my forecast, they said. But I knew, I had watched this thing taking shape for nearly six long years, from that day in January 1933 when Hitler came to power, and I was certain I was right. England and France were firmly set on their Gadarene policy, nothing that one man could say would alter it.
Now I wanted to be in Prague and see it happen. I was Central European Correspondent of my paper, responsible for all the countries of the Danubian Basin, and all the other Central European Correspondents, after the end of Austria, had automatically moved to Prague. I had been ordered to go to Budapest, a news cemetery. 'Other arrangements' had been made in Prague. I was resentful, but not surprised. I had put down in black and white what I thought was going to happen to Czechoslovakia, and, if I was right it was logical that the description of the tragedy would not be wanted from a man who felt so strongly about it as I did. Raging, but held back by some inward pull from immediate resignation, I went to Budapest.
I am thankful now to that inner voice, for I would not have missed that Hungarian summer for anything. I was able, at my free week-ends, to make flying trips to Prague on my own behalf, to peep through the window at the progress of that historic siege and enforced capitulation, the most terrible thing, in my view, that has happened since the World War and the most disastrous in its results. You will see this, and soon.
But I thank my stars for those summer days and nights in Hungary. Here I found again, for a few brief weeks, the rest and happiness which I had just found when the German armies crashed into Vienna, when Insanity Fair shattered the tranquillity that, after so many years, I had found within the massive walls of the old house in Vienna where I had my rooms.
There is going to be no peace for us who only want to work and build a world where the poorest have a right to sufficient food, to light and air and sunshine in their homes, to dignity and beauty, where weak nations have the right to protection against predatory great ones and where a majority of nations is ready at any time to combine against the pirates and despoilers, the slave-traders and tyrants.
You could have had that world, but now we who think like that are on the run again, the darkness is thickening once more. I myself, a tiny unit in the mass of human beings whose lives had already been changed or ruined by the first raiding forays of the new hordes of Armageddon, had for months been constantly on the move, travelling thousands of miles by car and train and aeroplane, living in suit-cases in hotels and bed-sitting-rooms, trying, while the cyclone of events howled about my ears, to plan a new future. I had not expected to find any rest at all in this summer of 1938.
I was the more grateful to Hungary for those sun-laden days, those starlit nights, for that little sheltered dwelling among the trees that was mine for nearly three months, for the balcony where I sat and talked and drank wine while the twilight thickened and the lights came palely out on the Schwabenberg and the scent of the flowers came up from the garden where the janitor was hosing the grass and singing softly to himself haunting Hungarian songs.
Outside, the world was mad and lecherous, and brutality and the lust for conquest were once more on the march, and fear was flying before them, with its few goods and chattels, homeless, despairing, hungry. The four horsemen were on the prowl again. I looked into that world when I flew to Prague, when I flew to Geneva. It poked its foul head even into my dwelling when I touched a switch, and the radio blared into the room the raving, ranting voices of the new Caesars.
But when I came back from my flying excursions, or turned the knob and silenced that blasphemous box, there was a peace, in that little refuge in a green corner of Budapest, that came to you like a warm and fleecy blanket in a bitter cold night. I loved it. Always there was, far at the back of my mind, the thought of that outer world, the thought of the future, the rage that men of my vintage must feel, if they have any feelings, when they look at the wreck of their hopes, at the shambles that 1938 has made out of 1918, when they think of the men who have committed these things or those old, rich men, more guilty still, who have omitted to prevent them, or did not want to prevent them.
But on those afternoons and evenings in Budapest this cankerous anger was only like the faint and distant clangour of an alarm bell in a still night. Here was peace and beauty. I loved my books -- not mine, but mine for the nonce -- I loved those quiet and starry evenings on the balcony, when we threw a rope of hopes into the air and sent the cherub of our imagination skimming up it, when the lights spattered on the black bowl that was the Schwabenberg grew brighter and brighter, the wine better and better, when the cheery German landlady brought coffee and sandwiches and retailed the talk of the town, when the moon rose higher and higher and the barking of the dogs filled the night and then gradually dwindled and was hushed, the last omnibus clattered by at the bottom of the road, the yellow windows blackened one after another - when Budapest went to bed and we sat there, talking quietly of the things that had been and were to come.
Unforgettably tranquil days and nights, stolen from Babel.
I must make an honest man of myself about Hungary. In Insanity Fair I included a chapter about Hungary, too hurriedly strung together and filled with the irritation that Hungary often inspired in me, because I saw, or thought I saw, there a country in the van of those that, nose-led by a small and covetous clique, lead our Europe from war to war and simultaneously oppose, with relentless consistency, the betterment of the masses. Because this small group, that kept power in its hands in much the same way as the ruling class in England, was interlinked by blood or acquaintance or common class prejudice or mutual interest with people of the same type in other lands, and because it employed a feminine skill in the exploitation of these relationships abroad, Hungary -- its little Hungary -- enjoyed particular sympathy in some other countries, particularly among the ruling class in England, which was coldly denied to countries where more plebeian rulers had done much greater things.
In England, for instance, several score Conservative Members of Parliament had once signed a manifesto calling for justice for Hungary, a small country that most of them knew nothing about. When the question arose of justice being done to another small country that they knew nothing about they were as silent as the grave. I saw in these things the influence of that class-antagonism which knows no frontiers, which ultimately caused England to connive at the rape of Abyssinia, to favour the Fascist cause in Spain, to compel the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia to the advantage of Germany and of Hungary, and which is now going to lead England to all sorts of queer places.
Bear this in mind, remember that Czechoslovakia took some of their acres from the great landlords and gave them to the landless peasants, that in Hungary agitation against 'the great estates' was an offence punishable by imprisonment up to 1936 or 1937, and that millions of peasants there own no land, bear in mind that Germany and Italy have both suppressed working-men's parties and organizations but have never encroached on the property either of the big industrialist or the big landowner, that the net result of the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia is to isolate Soviet Russia and give Germany a free hand in that direction, and you will begin to see the outline of things in Europe, the reason that events happen which continually take you by surprise, because you do not see this scarlet threat of cause and effect running through them.
In Hungary, as she was ruled, I could find no justification for the greater sympathy that was lavished on her by the class of people that rules England, and I suspected the motive. I knew that most of them, as I wrote in another book, did not know Hungary at all, though they might have been lavishly entertained in the restaurant of the Duna Palota Hotel, shown the excellent baths on the Margareten Island, taken round the night-clubs. The history of political entertainment in Hungary since the war, is one of those books which will unfortunately never be written.
But in the other Hungary that these people did not see, did not want to see, I found the peasants poorer, the workers worse off than in the other Danubian countries I knew, three of which had after the war gained territories previously under Hungarian rule. In Czechoslovakia I found insurance against unemployment and sickness and old age well rooted and thriving, roads, schools, hospitals being built, a country moving ahead fast and steadily raising the standard of the people's life. In Yugoslavia I found a movement, not yet so far advanced, but still firmly set on that path. Rumania was still farther behind, but still moving in that direction. In all these countries the peasants owned their land, and that is the priceless thing, that gives an entirely different look to the country, a different feeling to the very air you breathe.
In Hungary life seemed to have stood still since the war. It had stood still for decades and decades before that. Here you found, if you ventured out into the countryside, the still and lifeless atmosphere that springs from poverty and the peasant's land-hunger. With scarcely an effort, after the Rumanians had put an end to the brief, and predominantly Jewish, Communist regime of Aaron Cohen alias Béla Kun, the Hungarian ruling class had reimposed its iron grip on the country. Your charming Hungarian hosts often tried to discourage you if you told them you thought of spending a month or two deep in that uncharted countryside. If, nevertheless, you went, you found bitter poverty, primitive houses and roads, workers living in squalor, social institutions in their infancy, backwardness general.
Yet the Hungarians had lorded it for centuries over their neighbours, and the whole motive and keynote of Hungarian policy after the war was not to improve domestic conditions, but to regain those lost territories, where new rulers were making many improvements, and lord it over them again.
The Hungarians themselves have changed beyond recognition in the thousand years they have been sitting among the Carpathians and you will be a very clever man if, among the most interbred people in Europe, you can to-day put your finger on a Hungarian and say, 'This is a Magyar'. The aristocracy and middle classes, those very people who most delight your ear with their stories of the thousand-year-old Hungarian Kingdom and the close resemblance between Hungarian History and English History and between the Hungarian Constitution and the British Constitution, are in their origins largely German, Jewish, Czech, Slovak, Croat, Italian, Serb, Rumanian, Greek, French, Irish, and Turkish.
It is extremely difficult for you, bless your innocent hearts, to realize this, because they all bear romantic Hungarian names, and successive governments for long enough have encouraged this process of name-changing, but you would have a shock if you knew that practically every Magyar or Arpad or Istvan you meet is Schmidt or Cohen or Popovitch.
One of the recent governments, that of M. Darányi, was popularly said to contain one minister who was a true Magyar. The tale is that when this story got round to M. Kánya, the long-standing Foreign Minister, who is by way of being a wit, he said, 'What? Who is it? Show him to me.'
I see nothing to object to in this, indeed, it is another of the points of resemblance between Hungary and England. I myself am half Irish and half English, the Irish being, as I think, the bigger half; my English Jekyll frequently shudders at the things that my Irish Hyde writes.
But the astonishing thing is the way this cosmopolitan people has, in one respect, retained the chief characteristic of those raiding Asiatic horsemen who came, killing and plundering, from the Don and the Volga to the Carpathian lands a thousand years ago. Hungary in 1939 is like an enlarged photograph of Vienna before 1938. The blood of a dozen races is inextricably mixed here. Go east from Budapest and you come to German and Rumanian settlements. Go west from Budapest and you come to German settlements. Go south from Budapest and you come to German and Serbian settlements. Go north from Budapest and you come to Slovak settlements. And in Budapest itself, a third of the population is Jewish and the rest is a compound of which the ingredients defy analysis.
Yet they retain, unfiltered, that main characteristic of the nomadic Magyar horseman so well described by an Arab trader of the ninth century:
The Magyars are a race of Turks and their leader rides out with 20,000 horsemen. They have a plain which is all dry herbage and a wide territory ... They have completely subjugated the Slavs and they always order them to provide food for them and consider them as their slaves ... These Magyars are a handsome people and of good appearance, and their clothes are of silk brocade, and their weapons of silver encrusted with gold. They constantly plunder the Slavs.Leave out the silk brocade and the gold-encrusted daggers and there you have it after 1100 years, in 1939 - the proverbial predilection (I have taken this quotation from G. A. Macartney's Hungary) for plundering Slavs. In November 1938, as a pendant to the honourable peace of Munich, about 350,000 more Slavs were handed back to Hungarian rule.
Compare that old Arab's judgment with the genial description of his class given by the elder Count Andrássy about the middle of last century:
We Hungarians are noblemen, who make politics; for our labourers we need Slovaks and Germans, for our business affairs the Jews, who buy our wheat and wool, not to forget the gipsies, to make music for us.The remarkable thing about the Hungarians is that, although the Magyar blood has thinned down to vanishing point and they have not in recent centuries been able to indulge their 'proverbial predilection' by means of conquest, as those ancient warriors did, they have been able repeatedly to maintain their privileged place among the Danubian peoples by the astute exploitation of favourable circumstances.
In 1867, for instance, they were able to exploit the defeat of Austria by Prussia to obtain from the Emperor Francis Joseph, who until then had consistently gainsaid their demands, and even called in Russian help to suppress them by arms, a privileged position within the Habsburg Empire, and became the Overlords of Slovakia and Croatia. Those cads the Czechs had even offered to help the Austrians against the Prussians and been rudely rebuffed with the words, 'This is a war of Germans against Germans'. The Hungarians sent a corps of volunteers to help Prussia. The Czechs had a foretaste, in 1867, of the bitter dose they were to be made to swallow in 1938. 'Those nationalities which support the Government suffer and those that oppose it prosper', wrote Count Lützow then. He was right. The demands of the Czechs that the ancient rights of their Bohemian Kingdom should be restored were ignored. The Hungarians were made full partners in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
So in 1938. 'Those nations that support the League and democracy and collective resistance to the threat of force suffer and those that oppose it prosper.' Czechoslovakia was dismembered: Hungary profited.
Even in 1867 Hungary might not have come so well out of the mix-up but for that uncannily astute exploitation of circumstances. The lovelorn Francis Joseph might even then not have been won over to make Hungary a full partner in the Habsburg concern but for the passionate appeals, from Hungary, of his Empress Elisabeth - who did not love him, and who had been won over by the handsome Count Andrássy.
That is how Hungary looks to me when I contemplate our Europe, and I shall watch with great interest to see if, once again, Hungary is going to grow great and strong in Europe by such strange chances and devices, and whether, while that goes on, her peasants will continue to hunger vainly for the land, and her workers for social progress.
But I still have to make an honest man of myself about Hungary. I admired and respected Germany, though I think that the present rulers of Germany have an obsession of self-aggrandizement and self-commiseration, and lust for conquest and contempt for the rights of those weaker than themselves, which is going to bring inconceivable suffering to our Europe in my generation. I loved Austria, although I felt that the extermination, by Italian-inspired Fascism and the Roman Catholic Church, of the free Republic there in 1934 was one of the first of the crimes that have implacably, inevitably, led Europe to the edge of a very steep place.
So with Hungary. The guilt is not all on one side. Too much was taken from her, and some of it should have been given back years ago, but only as the price of an armour-plated and indestructible arrangement, which you then could have had, to confront any violent peacebreaker with overwhelming force. That much being said, it is equally true that her rulers, belonging to a small and exclusive class, have consistently pursued a policy that puts her at the side of those opposed to domestic progress and international peace.
But these processes are spread over many years, and in between there are so many days to be lived, and I know few countries where you can live them better than in Hungary. A man of my mind and generation, who sees all the ideals of humanity and social progress and freedom that a million Britishers died for being tossed contemptuously away as each day passes, can only be exasperated when he finds a country, socially backward, that still aspires to rule over freemen of other races, that still occasionally talks in terms of Extra Hungariam non est vita - 'Outside Hungary there is no life, or if there is a life, it is not like ours.'
But it is nevertheless true, as Macartney wrote, and I cannot better this phrase, that there is, and probably always was, a peculiar beauty and abundance in Hungary. I do not agree with him that it 'removed the temptation to wander'; I know too many Hungarians who long to wander. But the peculiar beauty and abundance are there. The abundance lies in the land, although it often does not yield the men who till and plough it enough to eat. The beauty lies in those Hungarian suns and skies, in those endless plains, as featureless as the ocean itself, in the charm that the people can so effortlessly exert, when they will.
These things are always with you, when you are in Hungary. The others do not so consistently obtrude themselves on you, especially if you are a foreigner; you have the good things of Hungary and do not feel the bad ones.
I was glad that I had, for a little while, lived in Hungary, and that I was able to see and feel and do so much in that short time. It was long enough to get the feel of the water. I did not find the people incessantly thinking about their frontiers, hating Czechs. They wanted the great landlords to be forced to relax their grip on the land, the Jews to be forced to relax their grip on the cities. They wanted to live as freemen. But their ruling class, while paying a little lip-service to these longings, actually did next to nothing about them, and once