Coningsby Dawson

“ I never believed that it was possible for so many people to be so hungry and still to go on living. After a certain point of agony has been reached, when the majority of the population possesses nothing, Bolshevism with all its brutal crudities will be welcome. Bolshevism practises at least one principle of social justice: in crises of destitution it sweeps aside property rights and insists that the citizens who have shall share. Day by day, as the tide of hunger rises, sane thinking is being overwhelmed. The goal towards which Central Europe is driving is undoubtedly Bolshevism. ”

“ The children of whatsoever nations we fought never ceased to be our friends.
And these children whom I saw today, most of them were not born when the war started. They had no voice in our animosities. They did not ask to he brought into such a world. Many of them since their first breath, have never known what it was to be warm and not to be hungry. To them joy is a word utterly meaningless. They have always been too weak to laugh or play. Two years after our madness has ended they are still paying the price of the adult world's folly. ”

“ Her mark, which was originally worth twenty-five cents, has sunk to an exchange value of one-sixth of a cent. The barbed wire entanglements come up to the very gates of Warsaw. The threat of a Bolshevist invasion in the spring is like a brutal hand, clapped against her lips, silencing laughter. It compels her, against her will, to keep her army mobilised; if she disbanded, she would make invasion certain. Every man she keeps under arms loses her a little of the world's sympathy. She knows that, but she does not dare to be unprotected. She is a nation in rags. ”

“ The Free Youth of Germany range in age from mere children to University students. They are against tyranny in every form, against meaningless conventions, against conscription, against war, against inherited hates, against all traditions and institutions which hamper and curtail their self-expression and capacity for self-development. If you ask them to formulate their doctrine, they grow vague. Each one answers in terms of his or her personal idealism and disillusionment. They want to be happy—that is what it amounts to and they have never been happy. ”

“ As oppression multiplied his voice grew, always protesting in defence of the under-dog. It was five years ago, after Russian Poland had been occupied by Germany, that he became representative of the Polish nation and leapt to the stature of a life-sized patriot. Today he is the Abraham Lincoln of Poland, a man of the people whose integrity is unpurchaseable. But his integrity without sanity would be worthless; it is his shrewd common sense that is saving the situation. He has his knife out for nobody except rogues and robbers. If he ever had class hatred, he has forgotten it. ”

“ From being honest women they become gaol-birds.
As a model-village you could scarcely imagine any sight more hopeless than the Marki of today. The stillness of death is in the streets. The chimneys are breathless. The people are lean, famine-fevered shadows. There is no laughter. No stir. Funerals are too common to cause excitement. While the machinery rots in the mill, men's souls rot in their bodies. From a place which was once throbbing with energy the incentive to endeavour has seeped away. There is no possibility to work ”

“ Czecho-Slovakia is not pleased at their presence; they are unwelcome guests. But, if their hope comes true, they are the brains of the new and better Russia which will give a lasting peace to the world. Because they believe their hope will come true, they train their brains relentlessly, studying, studying, studying. It does not matter that they are not wanted. They will be wanted. Meanwhile they starve and attend the University and learn.
And then I went to see Babuschka, who has kept this lamp of ardent idealism burning. ”

“ A people so poetically magnanimous are not likely to be wilfully cruel to children.
I visited the Foundling hospital in Budapest where parentless children are first adopted by the State. It is more like a palace than a hospital—an imposing series of buildings covering several acres; but it is only imposing from the outside. It is over-crowded and under-staffed. The war, with its retreats and invasions, has filled the land with tuberculosis and rickets. Five hundred are cared for in the cots; thirteen thousand have to be lodged elsewhere. The nurses are in patched clothing and rags. ”

“ We are a trunk of a nation now, shorn of our arms and legs. We cannot rise from the ground or stir. You have spared us our head, so we lie on our back and think, and die by inches.”
What is it that the Peace has really done to Europe? It has created a dozen Alsace-Lorraines by taking away territory from one people and bestowing it on another. It has manufactured new nations, with new paper currencies, negligible reserves, experimental constitutions and no previous experience to guide them in the restraints of self-government. It has multiplied frontiers and spun a spider-web of tariff-walls. ”

“ We set out on a misty morning to cover the hundred and fifty kilometres which lie between the ruined city of Brest-Litovsk and the nearest town of Kovel. The road runs straight as a pencilled line across the sullen landscape. In all that stretch of country there is scarcely a sign of cultivation. The fields have become a wilderness, the rivers have overflowed and the whole is a barren swamp. The desolation was begun in 1915 when the Russians retreated before the Germans, driving the civilian population behind them, seizing the cattle and harrying with fire and with dynamite. ”

“ Poland can have no peace till she has regained prosperity and her people have ceased to starve. What I want to say to the world is that there is no reason why we should starve; we have everything within our frontiers that could make us a rich nation. Before the war Poland, partitioned as she was, was self-supporting. And don't let anyone think that we are starving because we like it. Seventy per cent, of our cattle have been carried off by the Russian, German, Austrian and Bolshevist invasions. The machinery in our factories has been demolished or looted. ”

“ In order to obtain an authoritative answer, I approached Prince Sapieha, the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs. Rather to my amazement he was not at all elusive, but gave me the most convincing Arguments for Poland's peace desires that I have yet heard.
“The trouble with Poland,” he said, “is that she lies between Russia and Germany. That is not her fault; it is the way it happens. Our nation is in a place where it is not wanted; but you may take it from me that we are not going to get out. Germany has an over-population which increases every year by leaps and bounds. ”

“ But perhaps you think that though these things might have happened to you, you would not have deserved them—not in the sense that Central Europe deserves them. Had you been an Austrian your moral fineness would have revolted against your countrymen's war of opportunism and aggression. Perhaps! But men act in crowds and the probabilities are against you. All the enemy peoples with whom I have conversed, have claimed as the ideals which urged them to fight precisely the same ideals for which we sacrificed and ultimately triumphed—liberty, justice, righteousness. ”

“ If that happens, many States of Central Europe will go Bolshevist; Hungary will be the only State you will be able to trust. Poor Hungary, whom you have shorn of her possessions, she will be your bridge-head against the tide of anarchy. ”

“ The science and learning of both America and Great Britain are already the wiser for their devotion. Today we are saving thousands of lives by the past results of their medical discoveries. Most emphatically they are the kind of men who, were they to perish, it would be impossible to replace. And here they were cold, ill-nourished, shabby, bending voraciously over a rough plenty as though they were outcasts from the gutter. As the lunch progressed one noticed that, despite their hunger, they were restraining their appetites. ”

“ Today the respite for redemption has been cut down to three months; the Government cannot take the risk of a declining currency over a longer period.
This afternoon I visited the Dorotheum. It is a vast building, constructed on the grand scale like a palace. Up and down its marble stairway throng the more respectable part of the tragedy of Vienna; pressing hard upon its heels come the vulture purchasers, for the most part foreigners, intent on making bargains out of Austria's want. ”

“ The political map, as re-arranged by the Peace, has built walls across most of the old travel-routes; it has given ancient hostilities a new means of venting their animosities, has destroyed confidence and dislocated the entire system of transport. This is without doubt the fundamental answer to the question, “Why does Central Europe starve?” The fault is not one of sulkiness or laziness on the part of the people who do the starving. They are not starving in order to spite the Allies or because they derive a patriotic ecstasy from starvation. ”

“ She has cities which have been captured and occupied seven separate times since 1914 by the armies of seven separate nations. She is sick of war. She has elected a peasant for her prime minister—a man who belongs to the class which gains nothing but sorrow from bloodshed. All that Poland asks from the New Year is the quiet in which to convalesce from her wounds, so that she may gather strength to construct her nationhood along the lines of states-manly righteousness. As the clocks above Warsaw struck the hour of midnight, the prayer in every heart was, “God give us peace with the New Year.” ”

“ Perhaps it was the Three Kings she was expecting. This was the night when they were supposed to come, riding out of the East to leave their presents at the doors of the needy, just as twenty centuries ago they had tapped on the door of a stable in Bethlehem and found the Christ-Child in his poverty, asleep upon his mother's breast.
We gazed round the little room. It was speckless. All the rooms which we visited in this colony were. The people might be dying of starvation, but they were determined to die cleanly. That is the difference between your peasant and your city-dweller. ”

“ In spite of this, the point which cannot be made too emphatic is that it is middle-aged Germany, the contriver of the war, which is creating these offences. Young Germany is no party to them. It is just that a distinction should be made between the new and the old. The new is fighting our battle for us. In the universities it is fighting the professors who insist on teaching reactionary doctrines. The students being young, are sick and tired of the glorification of the old, bad past. They insist on starting with today and looking forward. ”

“ You may see them scrawled on the wall of the old Jesuit College at Brest-Litovsk where the Peace was signed: “Neither Peace Nor War. Trotsky.” If they were true of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, they are equally true of the Peace which has befallen Central Europe as the crowning achievement of the war which was to end all wars. It is not stating matters too strongly to say that up to date Peace had caused at least as much misery as the four years' fury of embattled armies. But there is this difference: the heavier portion of the present misery is being borne by women and children. ”

“ Their instinct for self-preservation comes uppermost. They drown one another as they struggle for a hold on the upturned boat. It was our clumsiness that upset them, so we are scarcely in a position to condemn. If we had wanted to impose our peace experiments, there was only one safe way in which to do it. We should have taken control of partitioned Europe and made ourselves responsible for its new countries, till they were sufficiently stabilised to function for themselves. ”

“ Vienna was a clean city and its municipal government was ahead of the times in the attention that it paid to housing conditions. So it happens that today in well-treed streets, flanked by model dwellings of artistic design, you are deceived unless you look behind the doors; for these people are not incorrigible slovens who parade their griefs and trade upon your pity. They are the unfortunates of a world-wide calamity, who creep into back rooms and prefer to die quietly. What I propose to do is what we did this Christmas Eve—push open a few of the doors and let you see what lies hidden. ”

“ The Dorotheum is a museum of domestic sacrifices. Here is the complete story of a country gone bankrupt. There is no exchange in the world that is so crowded. Never in its history did it do so thriving a trade. Early in the morning the crowd begins to gather, each individual carrying a shamefully concealed bundle; it does not disperse till the gates are closed at night. The Dorotheum is patronised by all classes, from the bank-clerk, raising a few crowns on an alarm clock, to the archduchess, pledging her jewels. ”

“ It is more fashionable to lay the blame on a group of elderly statesmen who met in Paris to arrange the pacification. They were the leaders who had piloted their nations to triumph—men of unstained integrity who, having survived incredible anxieties, had the right to be more war-jaded than any of their countrymen. ”