WHEN you walked down the Champs-Élysées you noticed, suddenly, the way the sun streamed through the chestnut trees; you watched the fountains at the Rond Point shooting into the air like a stream of diamonds; and you wandered along the banks of the Seine, wondering, with a fear that clutched at your heart, how long the glow of Paris would stay undimmed.
Only a few days before, on August 15th, the news had been flashed around the world that the German Army was mobilizing. Already the decorations, put up in July for the visit of the King and Queen of England, were being replaced by red, white and blue posters, calling on the people to prepare for the national defence—“pour sauvegarder la patrie”. Newspapers brought out extras every few hours and politics absorbed the minds of everyone from statesmen to couturiers. Peace was dying. In their hearts people knew it, but the actual fact was so appalling they clung desperately to hope. They kept a vigil in the death-chamber, clasping the patient’s cold hands and refusing to admit, even to themselves, the growing pallor of her face.
The agony of that long illness was terrible to watch. It lasted over a year, but the anguish of Europe was never again so acute as during those summer months when every type of medicine—hope, treachery, idealism and compromise—were feverishly injected in her veins in a desperate attempt to keep her alive. Her recovery at Munich was an artificial one. After that she went into a coma and a year later died.
I had given up all idea of returning to America and joined the staff of the London Sunday Times as a permanent “roving” correspondent. During the next year my job sent me to many countries and many capitals, and I watched the lights in the death-chamber go out one by one, until the sheets were pulled up over the corpse’s head and the European continent reverberated to the roar of bombers. That pre-Munich August, when despair was sweeping France, I stayed once again with the Baroness X in her flat off the Champs-Élysées where I had written my Spanish articles.
The sun flooded the balcony and the shrill voice of the concierge broke the early morning stillness just as it had the year before. The only difference was that now the concierge no longer spent her time bargaining; instead, she discussed the political situation. One morning I overheard her arguing with the baker. He was grumbling that France’s internal affairs were a mélange of stupidity; no one ever seemed to agree while Germany, on the other hand, made lightning decisions. This brought a sharp retort from the concierge, who said, naturally, it was bound to be so; Germany was Hitler, but France was a lot of people. She rebuked him for putting the blame on internal affairs. France’s difficulty was not due to the falling birth-rate or the devaluation of the franc, or even the friction between Left and Right. France’s difficulty, she said fiercely, was the same as it had always been—her geographical position. I couldn’t hear the baker’s reply. Probably he agreed, for it was the terrible repetition of history that haunted the French more than anything else. The scarred battlefields of the north had not even had time to heal and now the German Army was marching again.
I had never seen those battlefields and one morning I took a train to Amiens with Tommy Thompson, who had come to Paris on leave. We hired a taxi and drove to Vimy Ridge, and then to Bapaume and across the old Somme battlefield. I was startled to find how fresh the wounds of the last struggle had remained. For miles we drove through a battered and desolate countryside. With the world on the threshold of a new war, the old war seemed to move out of the pages of history like an angry skeleton. Along the main road there were still signs warning the public not to trespass beyond certain limits for fear of unexploded shells and grenades. Further on there were crumbling machine-gun emplacements and rusted barbed wire stakes stuck in the ground as firmly as on the day when some hand had placed them there two decades ago.
Along Vimy Ridge the ground was pitted with shell-holes and gouged by huge mine craters. Over 100,000 men had died on the hill before it had finally been captured by the Canadians in 1917. It was grim walking up the Ridge, but when we reached the top the skeleton vanished and tragedy turned into a bitter comedy. It was a sunny day and the slope was crowded with sightseers. Families had brought picnic lunches with them and settled themselves comfortably in shell-holes which offered shade from the sun. Guides were busy conducting parties of tourists into the damp, twisting underground tunnels where the soldiers had fought for five francs a head. Nearby, a luncheon-stand did a thriving business in beer and snacks.
Tommy got into conversation with our taxi-driver, and discovered he had fought in the first battle of Vimy Ridge. He regarded the scene with a certain ironical amusement. It was all right for people to bring picnic lunches, he said. When he had been in the trenches he and his friends had often joked that one day people would pay money to see where they had fought. But what wasn’t all right was that only twenty years later Europe should be standing on the brink of another war. But he shrugged his shoulders: “It is always the same story; France against the Boches.”
For weeks that scene haunted me. The shrug of the taxi-driver’s shoulders and the look on his face was symbolic of the despair that swept the country. During the next two weeks I motored from Paris to Saint Jean-de-Luz, along the Spanish Frontier and up the Riviera to the gay and noisy port of Marseilles. I talked with people all along the way, and on looking over my notes, the reaction was always the same: war must be prevented. Over and over again, people repeated the phrase that Hitler was only bluffing, and if France stood firm the catastrophe could be averted. I suppose one should have taken warning from this psychology. France must stand firm, not because France was firm, but in order to prevent a war. The whole policy of the country was built on the hypothesis that Hitler was bluffing. But what if Hitler wasn’t bluffing, what then?
Every week French statesmen repeated their solemn assurances to Czechoslovakia; it was all part of the game. Most people, myself included, accepted this show of strength on its face value. When I got back to Paris I was shocked to hear Sir Charles Mendl, the Press Attaché of the British Embassy, say he didn’t believe the French intended to fight for Czechoslovakia. “But how can they go back on their pledge?” I protested. “I don’t know,” replied Sir Charles. “But I’ve lived in this country for twenty-five years and it doesn’t ring true. I don’t believe they’re going to fight.”
I thought Charles was cynical. When I left Paris for Berlin in August, I wondered if I would return to find it blacked out and the people of France at war.
* * *
Berlin offered a strong contrast to the beauty of the French capital. It was cold and windy and a feeling of menace hung in the air. The pavements were crowded with uniforms and the streets resounded to the sound of tanks and armoured cars. Even the sombre grey buildings had a forbidding look. I’d never been to Berlin before, and when I wandered about I had the same feeling of uneasiness as when I had first seen Franco’s guards on the International Bridge at Hendaye. Instinctively, this was “the enemy”. Although my country was three thousand miles away, the ideas for which it stood were threatened just as much as though its borders were contiguous with those of Czechoslovakia.
I tried to overcome this feeling and set to work to gather material for articles. I stayed at the Hotel Adlon on the Unter den Linden, which, during the last war, had been the social centre of Berlin. In 1914 the lobby had been crowded with multi-coloured Austrian, Hungarian and Prussian uniforms; now it was filled with the brown and black of the S.A. and the S.S. men. The bar of the Grill Room, however, was always crowded with foreigners; before lunch it filled up with journalists, diplomats, military attachés and business men, and was referred to affectionately as “The Club”.
The German clerks and porters were polite and helpful, but there was the same uncomfortable atmosphere I had found in Spain: always guarded conversations and a feeling of being watched. Most of the telephones were tapped and you could often hear the click of the recording machines at the other end of the line. The telephone of the British military attaché, Colonel Macfarlane, was fitted with a wire that ran into the German War Office. This became known when the telephone went out of order and an engineer came to repair it. After labouring over it for several hours it still failed to work. The engineer looked at it stupidly, scratched his head, and said: “I can’t understand it. It’s working all right at the War Office.”
The German press attack on Czechoslovakia was increasing in violence, and even in the hotel you saw signs of uneasiness. Several times I found a group of waiters clustered together outside my room, hastily reading the English papers before delivering them, and one night at dinner an old lady at the next table burst into tears saying that it was like 1914 all over again. During the next few weeks the offices of the foreign correspondents were besieged by people begging to know “what the situation really was”.
I presented my papers at the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Propaganda and started on a series of interviews. I visited schools, labour camps and welfare organisations. The Germans who took me round were agreeable and efficient and argued their case with conviction. But all the time I couldn’t help thinking of the quotation from Stevenson: “What you are speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.” The soft words about social progress were drowned by the rumble of tanks on the streets of Berlin.
* * *
Every evening the foreign correspondents gathered at the Taverna, a small restaurant on the Courbierestrasse. The Taverna was first made popular by H. R. Knickerbocker and Edgar Mowrer, two American journalists who were expelled from Germany soon after Hitler came to power. (Edgar Mowrer was told to leave in 1933 after the publication of his book Germany Puts the Clock Back. When he asked on what grounds he was being expelled, the Foreign Office official replied bluntly: “The Führer didn’t like your book.” To which Edgar is said to have replied: “Oh, that’s all right. Tell him I didn’t like his either.”)
The Taverna had continued to be a nightly meeting-place, and although the room was usually crowded a table was always reserved for the foreign press. The correspondents I saw the most of were Euan Butler of The Times and Edward Beattie of the United Press. Although The Times favoured appeasement, Euan and his colleague, Jimmy Holburn, managed to charge their despatches with a warning note which didn’t endear them to the local authorities.
Euan believed that war with Germany was inevitable. One night at the Taverna he looked around the room at the young German soldiers and the S.S. men and remarked in a ringing voice: “What a bore it’s going to be to have to kill so many of these people.” At the height of the attack on Czechoslovakia he persuaded the slightly intoxicated piano-player to swing into the Marseillaise. Some of the Germans joined in the tune until it suddenly dawned on them it wasn’t the proper moment for such a song, and the manager indignantly ordered the piano-player to change to a German march.
Most of the correspondents pooled their information, as there was small opportunity of getting a ‘scoop’. There was little news apart from that given in official ‘handouts’, and for the most part, a journalist’s job was limited to the interpretation he put on the events of the day. It wasn’t difficult to form an accurate appreciation of the situation, for Berlin officials made no effort to conceal Germany’s aims. This astonished me more than anything else. While the world was being assured that after a just settlement of the Sudeten German grievances, the Third Reich had no further ambitions, Nazi spokesmen in Berlin talked openly of the new world to come.
One night I had dinner with Herr von Strempel, a Foreign Office official, now in the German Embassy in Washington, who told me bluntly that Sudeten self-determination was only another name for Germany’s passage to the Black Sea. On another occasion, I had cocktails with Dr. Karl Silex, editor of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, who said, just as bluntly, that the whole of South-Eastern Europe must come under Germany’s rule. Certainly there was no secret about it; if subsequent events came as a shock to British, French and American statesmen, it was not due to Nazi discretion.
There was not a foreign correspondent in Berlin unaware of the fact that the “socialization” of Germany was only another term for the militarization of Germany; that chemists and scientists were experimenting to increase the country’s wartime self-sufficiency, while armament factories worked on triple shifts; that school-children were being drilled on “Racial Science”, “Eugenics” and “Heredity”, to prove that the superiority of the German race justified Hitler’s programme of expansion. After Czechoslovakia more countries would follow until Germany became so powerful that no nation would dare to accept her challenge. I doubt if even the great mass of Germans were taken in by the press campaign against the Czechs. Those who believed in the Führer accepted the doctrine of expansion as a matter of course.
One night at the Taverna, Euan Butler got into conversation with a waiter, who confided that his wife was going to have another child. “It will be our sixth,” he said proudly. When Euan asked why he wanted such a large family, the man regarded him with mild surprise: “Because Germany must advance.”
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Propaganda continued to assure the world of Germany’s pacific intentions. Certainly no country has ever conducted a more effective sales campaign. The flood of material that went forth each day from the great white building on the Wilhelmstrasse affected the judgment and paralysed the will of thousands of people. Not only did it convince many powerful politicians of the justness of Germany’s claims, but it sowed suspicion and fear and infected treachery into countries which have since fallen by the wayside. The propaganda was devised with cunning; no class was ignored. It attacked the capitalists to appeal to the working-man; it attacked the communists to appeal to the capitalists. It created dissension by excoriating the foreign press as “Jewish controlled”. It jeered at freedom, coupling it with unemployment, and extolled National Socialism as a model economic system in spite of the fact that 40 per cent of German labour was absorbed by the country’s expanding war-machine. To-day, it is no exaggeration to claim that out of the eleven countries smashed and overrun by Germany, half of them were destroyed, not by tanks, but by propaganda.
When I was in the Propaganda Ministry one day, I walked into the wrong room by mistake and found over 200 German journalists gathered to receive their daily instructions. The room was noisy and crowded and blue with smoke. I was hustled out quickly and discovered later that I had invaded the holy of holies. The penalty for a German who revealed the instructions given at one of these conferences was death!
I never met the genius of the Ministry, Dr. Goebbels, but just before I left Berlin I ran into him (literally) in the lobby of the Adlon. It was during the State visit of Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian Regent. A large military demonstration was given in the latter’s honour. It took place at the Technische Hochschule, on the outskirts of Berlin. Hitler and Horthy stood in the reviewing box while shock troops goose-stepped past followed by a long procession of tanks, guns and armoured cars. The climax of the review came when a Big Bertha, a cannon of enormous dimensions, was dragged past the stand. The crowd looked at it in astonishment, then burst into a roar of wild and spontaneous cheering. Ed Beattie, who was standing next to me, gave a sour smile and remarked above the din, “A dear little German reaction.” In the next box the military attachés scribbled notes on their cuffs and the agency correspondents made a dash for the nearest telephone box. The gun wasn’t a new invention, only a show-piece; at any rate, it seemed to have the desired effect on the crowd.
After the review we went back to the hotel. Admiral Horthy had brought a large retinue with him and the lobby was crowded with brightly-coloured uniforms, medals and decorations. In the midst of all the splendour, stood a small man in a drab brown uniform, his back turned to me. He seemed out of place among the gay plumage and I remember thinking he was probably a humble aide-de-camp. About ten minutes later a telephone call came for me, and I pushed my way through the crowded lobby and made a dash round the corner to the public booth. I collided squarely with the small man in the brown uniform. I stepped back, apologizing, and saw that he was no other than Dr. Joseph Paul Goebbels. He smiled wryly and went off, rubbing his shoulder. That was my only contact with him. But on looking back, the events of the day seemed to fit into a neat pattern: the gun and Dr. Goebbels; the sword and the pen; Germany marches on.