The New Germany Part 4

"Field-guns? We haven't any," they say, surprised.

"And how do you keep the troops in check?"

"Oh, those boys! Two of us take machine-guns, charge with them down each side of the street, and they run."

"And how many of you are there?"

"Some two or three hundred perhaps--it varies, but we're all old soldiers--we allow no boys to fight for us."

"And have you shot the sixty policemen you took in the Lichtenberg station?"

"Sixty policemen? There aren't that number in all Lichtenberg. Two got shot defending the station, but after they surrendered to a quarter of their number we let them all go home. You can go and see any of them."

It is impossible not to believe these intelligent, even intellectual and eminently honest faces. So the sixty policemen follow the field-guns and the "ring of steel" into the limbo of "White" lies.

We pa.s.s a railway goods yard where plundered flour is being carried away in sacks.

"Where is that going?" we ask.

"To the bakers, and afterwards to be distributed gratis to the crowd."

We see later women with red crosses distributing loaves from a cart to women and children. We reach our destination, only to be warned by a woman just in time that it is now occupied by troops--a narrow escape that so shakes the nerve of our guide that he takes refuge in a dressing station improvised in a shop. Here are "neutral" doctors and nurses, very angry at the bombardment of crowded tenement houses and the reckless shooting by the young volunteers. They run great risks, as robbers have so often misused the Red Cross that it is now no protection against the Government troops. Here are many wounded, mostly women and children, and but a few fighters. The latter all indignantly deny having shot prisoners, though they know the other side are doing it. And then at last to the evasive Headquarters, where the leaders tell us of what they hope to achieve by this desperate resistance of a few hundred men armed with rifles and bombs against as many thousands armed with all the machinery of modern war.

"Noske," they say, "is only a puppet in the hands of Majors Gilsa and Hammerstein, and they are agents of the Eden Hotel, the headquarters of the Cavalry Guard and the centre of reaction. The old story again of Bethmann-Hollweg, Ludendorff, and the General Staff, militarism and monarchism is what all this bombardment means, for they want to convince the Entente that they must have a large standing Army. They have just raised the pay and doubled the rations of these young mercenaries. Why don't the Entente abolish them and insist on a Swiss Militia here?

"If this White Guard goes on, we shall organise a Red Guard, and we shall win. But that will mean Bolshevism. We are not Bolsheviks, but Socialists to-day. We have offered to keep order in Berlin and here, with a militia representing all parties, but they go on bombarding. It is the old Prussian terrorism again. They have learnt nothing from the war."

And, so, in the twilight, back the way we came, wondering at the working of moral laws that have now subjected Berlin to a self-inflicted punishment of bombardments and bombings worse than any of those it inflicted on other cities.

Firing heavy artillery at crowded tenement houses, even with reduced charges and plentiful blank, means a butcher's bill of several thousands, mostly women and children, and damage to property of several millions.

Next day we extract the following from the advertis.e.m.e.nt sheet of our daily paper:--

"Reinhard Brigade. Mine-Throwers."

"Officers, non-commissioned officers and men with mine-thrower training urgently required. Comrades! Consider the crisis!

Come and help! Spartacus must be crushed with every weapon.

Report to the Brigade Reinhard, at the New Criminal Court, Turmerstra.s.se 91."

"Obituary."

"On the 12th March, innocent victims of these troubled times, through the destruction of my house by a mine-thrower, my little Adolf and Bertha, aged 12 and 8 years."

The behaviour of the Government can only be explained by their having left the whole matter to Noske, who, in turn, left it to his military advisers, Majors Gilsa, Pabst, and Hammerstein, who again were agents only of the militarist reactionary faction. This faction intended to exploit the crisis by killing two birds with one stone--the anti-Bolshevists at Paris and the pro-Bolshevists at Berlin. Their policy was to make an excuse for raising a large professional army with which to suppress the revolution and, if the G.o.ds were kind, to restore Germany's ancient _regime_ and its racial frontiers. For this purpose atrocities were invented as a pretext for reprisals and for recruiting and raising the pay of the Frei-Corps. The Government could have kept order of a sort through the revolutionary corps if it had kept in touch with the revolutionary councils; but it fought the corps with flying columns of under-trained over-armed boys, and it fought the councils with its patched-up majority of old parliamentary hands and party hacks.

In the resultant civil war that raged, and still rages, all over Germany one may distinguish certain combats more decisive than the others. There were the conflicts in Berlin--of December against the Marine Division, of January against the Spartacists, and of March against the Republican Guard and other corps. In the provinces, the expeditions against Bremen, Halle, Brunswick, and Munich. I saw nothing of the first of these, but something of the fall of the revolutionary movements of Halle, Brunswick, and Munich. And with each of these failures ended some distinctive element of the German revolution. With each of these failures the German revolution took a fresh impetus and a more extreme form.

The trouble at Bremen was merely a collision between the centre of the renascent reaction at Berlin and the original source of the revolution among the soldiers and sailors of the seaboard towns. The revolution first broke out at Bremen and was spread from there by parties of sailors who established themselves in the leading towns of the interior, including Berlin; and wherever they settled they became the "Red Guard" of the revolution. Bremen was therefore not only the Bethlehem of the new gospel, but was also the key position to the control of the coast. And this control was indispensable to the Government, which was negotiating with the Allies for the importation of foodstuffs in mitigation of the blockade. For the revolutionary extremists, recognising that the blockade was breeding revolt, kept throwing every difficulty in the way of importing food. They first refused to allow the German steamers to sail under the agreement, and then refused to allow foodstuffs to be unloaded. The Government were thus forced, probably not unwillingly, into military action against the revolution in the interests of famine relief. When Gerstenberg's flying column occupied Bremen in February with little serious fighting, the revolutionary policy of barring off Germany from the conservative West and turning it towards the Council government of Russia finally failed. The desperate plan of strangling and starving Germany into revolution was defeated by the German middle cla.s.s, who preferred, even at the cost of immediate civil war, to go into economic slavery to France and England rather than to go into political outlawry with Russia. The fall of Bremen really finished all immediate chances of Russian "Bolshevism" in Germany.

The Halle affair in March was a less crucial business, though critical enough for a time. The Saxon towns had been in a state of economic unrest that increased as the impotence of the Weimar a.s.sembly became more obvious. Thus the smaller towns in the immediate neighbourhood of Weimar, like Erfurt and Jena, became outposts of revolution, permanently menacing the deliberations of the a.s.sembly in the cla.s.sic groves of the Ilm. Small bands of revolutionaries even penetrated Weimar itself, until the roads and railways were barred. It was some weeks before the Saxon Frei-Corps of Jagers, under General Maerker, were strong enough to attempt expeditions against the smaller Thuringian towns. And the General himself had, in these early days, more than one narrow escape. His small force was still very weak in numbers and discipline when a general strike was declared at Halle, with the avowed political object of cutting communications between the Legislature at Weimar and the Administration at Berlin. Obviously, if Weimar could be seized, or even surrounded by the revolutionaries, the parliamentary system of government must collapse and a revolutionary Saxony would divide the Prussian bureaucrats from the South German burghers. This plan--if plan it was--and not merely a process of inchoate and unconscious forces, was defeated by the Maerker expedition to Halle; and those who are interested in the outside as well as the inside of political events may learn something of what the civil war in Germany was like in the following diary of my experiences with this expedition.

_Friday Afternoon._--The green room of the Weimar Theatre--now the National a.s.sembly--and the War Minister Noske on a sofa, a big beetle-browed, bullet-headed type of German, a Bismarck Mk. II., but evidently underfed and overstrained. On a chair a sharp-nosed intelligence officer, for War Ministers must be careful these days who they see and what they say. After some talk I ask leave to go with the Government troops who are to reopen the rail to Berlin by occupying Halle. The intelligence officer demurs, but Noske good humouredly agrees to my arguments, scribbles a word or two on the back of my card, and hurries off to catch the Berlin train. He will have to spend all night going round by Chemnitz and Dresden.

_Friday Midnight._--A fourth-cla.s.s carriage in the third of three troop trains conveying 4,000 men and 20 guns to Halle. Five of us are perched on the narrow wooden seats; two officers in mufti, and two Halle deputies going as Government delegates, one a brisk little Democrat, the other a patriarchal Social-Democrat, in a long white beard and a broad black hat. We make the best of it. One officer has a candle, the other a stock of war adventures; I have a bottle of wine and a budget of news from outside; the patriarch has sections of an eel and views on the food question, which he roars like a hungry lion.

b.u.mp! we are mostly on the floor. The engine of No. 2 has broken down, and we have trodden on and derailed its tail. We pile into train No.

1, and get cus.h.i.+oned seats. The officers snore, the patriarch dozes, rumbling like a distant storm. Only the little Democrat sits brooding.

"Oh, Halle! Halle!" he mutters, "that I should ever come to you like this."

_Sat.u.r.day Morning._--The General and I are marching up the road to Halle; behind us officers in mufti, beside us the head of the column of volunteers. The little General is telling me this is the seventh town he and his flying column have occupied, but the first real big one. An expert in Bolshevist busting, this tiny General of a toy army, with the face and manner of a dear demure little old maiden lady. He ignores politely the women and boys, who are shouting, "Bloodhounds!"

"Brutes!" "Vultures!" "Vermin!" and salutes scrupulously any burgher bold enough to wave.

So we enter Halle, pa.s.s the factories and skysc.r.a.pers, where the hands live stacked in tiers, and then occupy the station yard. The General with a few officers and men, marches straight through the great deserted station into the guardroom of the insurgent troops. The guard, taken by surprise, seize their rifles, and some c.o.c.k and point them, shouting threats. The little General raps out an order like a machine-gun, and after a long half-minute a man drops his rifle, the others follow suit, and all file out--one shouting in a heart-broken voice, "Is this all we can do?" A deputation of sailors arrives, fine upstanding fellows, with intelligent faces. These are the real fighters, and some hundreds of them are occupying a building in the town. They have probably only come to find out what chance there is of holding it, and the guns outside are answer enough, for they leave abruptly. The General sends a summons to evacuate after them, and they have cleared before their building is surrounded. "Those cursed blue boys," says a young officer. "What wouldn't I have done for them during the war, and now they've brought us to this."

_Sat.u.r.day Afternoon._--The General with a few officers and a half-company, is walking down to the Town Hall to arrange with the local authorities. I am congratulating him on everything being so well over--and add, as I see the market-place ahead packed with people and ugly-looking roughs hooting us--that in England things would be about going to begin. I've hardly said it before they do begin. The crowd, annoyed at the hauling down of the red flag and hoisting of the red, white, and black, storms the Town Hall, tears the machine-guns and rifles from our guard there, and smashes them, seizes a motor and an ambulance, which it afterwards runs blazing into the river, and carries off two officers, whom it shuts up in the Red Tower, a mediaeval fortress. They then turn on our little party, which is in rapid retreat on the Post Office, but we stand them off until we are behind the iron gates. An angry mob howls outside, but when they get to shaking or scaling the gates a movement from the sentries inside is enough still to stop them. At last reinforcements arrive, forcing their way through the crowd, which, however, falls on the last files and tries to haul them off. We sally out and pull them in, shouting to the soldiers, now as angry as the mob, not to shoot. But already there comes the crack of rifles and the rattle of a machine-gun from another position up the street. Firing becomes general. The crowd scatters in all directions, and the empty streets round are picketed with machine-guns. The General, regardless of roof snipers, comes round, patting his young soldiers on the back. "Well," says he to me, "here we are, and the only question is, are we holding Halle or is Halle holding us?"

_Sat.u.r.day Evening._--A long table in the Post Office. At one end the little General, behind him two officers, one smiling, the other scowling. On his right the two "Independent" tribunes of the people, representing the workmen's councils, beyond them commandants of the local barracks, at the foot representatives of the burgher committee and the little Democrat, on the General's left representatives of the soldiers' council, probably students. The Patriarch has, however, disappeared, the march of events having been too rapid for him. The General is very short with the student soldiers, and very urbane with the Independent politicians who are or were in control of Halle--one is another Bismarck type, Mk. III. this time, the other a Bernard Shaw Mk. II. A strong combination of authority with audacity; but I doubt the General with his steel-helmeted troops and machine-guns will be stronger. Their case is that they kept order until the troops came, and they can only restore it if the troops go. The General and the burgher delegates accuse them of arming and agitating the proletariat, which they indignantly deny. The discussion is interrupted at intervals by the irruption of dingy individuals, who report disorders and discoveries, and I suspect the General of having realised the dramatic value of the messenger in Greek tragedy. Finally, the two tribunes agree to put out posters that the troops have nothing to do with the strike, and must be let alone. This negative result horrifies the burghers, and the General, leaving the table, is besieged by earwigging notables imploring him to arrest the two tribunes. "I saw them leaving the house that fired the first shot," hisses a flabby frock-coated party with a grog-blossomy nose. "Bernard Shaw" overhears him, but only strokes his thin beard and his moustaches curl in a cynical smile. He knows the General knows his business.

_Sat.u.r.day Midnight._--I've been out and in through the pickets and among the armed parties of the other side several times, and a major in mufti and I are going out to a hotel. Two journalists who've made their way in, and regret it, decide to follow us. Nearing the cleared street, we turn up a side street and come right on an armed party. The journalists, a few paces behind, bolt round the corner, which leads to our being stopped and questioned. I engage their attention all I can to give the major a chance of slipping off, which he wisely does.

Unfortunately, this gives time for a larger crowd to gather than I can manage, and they march me off to the market-place, where they become a mob. Ugly roughs and excited boys keep pressing in, and several have seen me with the General. The ring round me gets savage, and I have increasing difficulty in keeping those round me quiet. A man shouts at me in Russian, asking whether I'm from Joffe. I repudiate Joffe, but knowing Russian gets me a friend or two. One calls up some armed sailors and persuades them to take me to their guard-house. A plucky little burgher who has been appearing and disappearing in the welter attaches himself to the party. The crowd follows until a machine-gun opens near by and scatters it. Our party gets smaller each time we run or shelter from the machine-guns, which are playing on the plundering parties. I find the burgher will take me in if I get rid of the escort, so, distributing some small notes, I suggest we should all be better off at home. Some agree, others object, but a machine-gun closures the debate without a division and I spend the night on the friendly burgher's sofa.

_Sunday Morning._--I hear from the burgher that an aide-de-camp of the General caught by the mob in mufti with the General's orders in his pocket, soon after my escape, has been thrown into the river and shot as he swam. The town is still in the hands of the revolutionaries, but quite quiet except round the buildings held by the troops. After changing my appearance and borrowing the burgher's hat, I go round in a crowd of Sunday sightseers staring at the looted shops and the bullet-starred houses. Near the Post Office there is sniping from the roofs, and a hand grenade is thrown almost on top of us. There are ugly red blotches in the streets among the broken gla.s.s. Running the gauntlet of the pickets, I find the General very glad to see me. The scowling officer shows me a sniper behind a chimney-pot who has just shot the smiling officer. The situation militarily and politically is temporarily at a deadlock, and the only interest in staying is the risk of being sniped in the Post Office or mobbed in the town. The General offers me a pa.s.sage to Weimar with the "flying post."

_Sunday Afternoon._--The Halle flying ground. While one of the few planes left is being patched up the officer is telling me of his difficulties. He daren't leave the men alone for an hour. The plane with the post for Weimar I travel with has to be represented as going to Magdeburg, or the men might stop its starting. He holds on because the planes are indispensable to the Government, but when he came back from the front, and the orders and badges were torn from his coat, "something broke in him." His family has always been military, but now it's over, and he is going to the Argentine. But my pilot is tougher stuff. A man of the middle cla.s.s, pilot since 1912, fighting scout through the war, a friend of the great fliers and of Fokker, he had had good openings abroad. "But no," says he; "Germany's going down out of control, but if it crashes I crash with it."

So after careful scrutiny to see that nothing has been half sawn through, as it was a few days before, we climb in. The roar of the motor drowns the distant rattle of the machine-guns, and Halle disappears below into the dusk as we drive into the red glare of the setting sun.

Germany at this time was like a seething pot. Outbreaks such as that at Halle were only bubbles breaking out on the surface. At any moment one expected the whole heaving, simmering ma.s.s to boil over. But, wherever a centre of ebullition declared itself the Government quenched the upheaval with a douche of Frei-Corps.

Such a centre from the first days of revolution was Brunswick. Indeed, Brunswick had been such a centre of disturbance from the earliest days of German history. The chronicles of Brunswick show the workmen of that town always in the van not only of German but of European movements. They were indeed Bolsheviks as early as 1292; and it was largely owing to the improvement in the workmen's position that they forced on the German towns in the following century that the general risings of the proletariat, that led to civil war in England and France, were in Saxony comparatively bloodless.[A]

And, as soon as the revolution broke out in the North Sea Coast towns, Brunswick gave it its first welcome to the interior. Bodies of sailors, travelling up from the coast as the vanguard of revolution, had established it in Brunswick, the day after the first outbreak at Wilhelmshaven; and thereafter Brunswick threw itself wholeheartedly into a real revolutionary _regime_.

The little State of Brunswick consists of the mediaeval town and a ring of industrial suburbs separate from the town, with satellite rural townlets and villages. The political life and vital heat of Brunswick centre now in this mushroom ring of factories, where the old rebel character of the State is more truly reproduced than among the burghers and bauers of the dead town and dormant villages. Under pressure from the workmen in these factories Brunswick established a government that, unlike that of Berlin, was sufficiently revolutionary to attempt to realise the social revolution. When the inevitable split came between the Social-Democrats in power and the Independents in opposition, Brunswick declared for the Independents. The free Republic of Brunswick became a citadel of the Independent extremists, a centre of revolutionary propaganda and a _corpus vile_ for the application of revolutionary principles. And it was unfortunate that it made itself so obnoxious to its big neighbour, Berlin, in its first two characters that its services in the third capacity were overlooked. For Brunswick was working out a _regime_ which was in fact a compromise between the revolutionary inst.i.tutions of council government and the established parliamentary system of its const.i.tutional Government. True parliamentary inst.i.tutions had under the leaders.h.i.+p of extremists like Merges been relegated rather to the background. But they had not been abolished and remained ready to function, when required, as a sort of Second Chamber and conservative counterbalance to the radical _regime_ of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils. Nor had this _regime_ so far as I could ascertain done any irremediable material harm, while it had certainly done real moral service. The propertied and professional cla.s.ses had been alarmed certainly; but had learnt to defend themselves very effectively by strikes and refusal of taxes, and had thereby obtained recognition of their rights as a numerical minority.

Feeling, of course, ran high; but the freedom of speech of the burghers was never curtailed while the workmen's party was in power.

Of course, the workmen's leader, the hunchback tailor Merges, was represented as a sort of ogre throughout Germany, but the Brunswick burghers rather despised than dreaded him. Their opinion of the rule of the "Arbeiter Rat," or Workmen's Board, is expressed in these lines pasted on the pedestal of the equestrian statue representing Duke William of ever pious and still immortal memory (obiit, 1884).

"Good Old Bill, if you'll get down, Merges shall give up your crown.

We'll put you on the Board, of course, And put the tailor on your horse."

As reaction developed at Berlin and revolution at Brunswick it became evident that once again in its history a bullying Berlin would bash a b.u.mptious Brunswick. This simple solution as between the two centres of the main conflict that has divided Germany was delayed by cross complications coming from conflicts belonging to another plane, and to an older chapter. Brunswick town, unlike Halle or Hamburg, was a free Republic--more than that it was a semi-sovereign State. The semi-sovereign rights of the lesser German States were one of the ancient bulwarks used by the reactionary government as defences against a levelling revolution. They were particularly dear to the Centrum supporters of the Government as the temporal entrenchments of the Clerical position. And so the free and Independent republicans of Brunswick had a longer lease of power than might have been expected.

Finally, political and personal considerations combined to overcome the reluctance of the Berlin Government to take military action against a Free State. As usual the personal factor probably forced the decision and the incident throws a sidelight on German politics of this period.

Magdeburg, an industrial town on the main line between Berlin and Brunswick and on the borders of Brunswick State, had been a political stronghold of Majoritarian Social-Democracy. But it had been so affected by the drift of the workmen to the left that by the end of April the Independents believed they had a majority in that parliamentary const.i.tuency. Now the representative of this const.i.tuency was the moving spirit, the Machiavelli, of the ministry--Landsberg. This Polish Jew has already been referred to as the brains of the Government. He, as representing Majoritarian Social Democracy and Erzberger as representing middle-cla.s.s Clericalism, were the cement of the coalition between Social-Democracy and the Centrum, a coalition based on love of office and fear of the Opposition. So Landsberg finding his own seat threatening defection to the Opposition and joining a general strike of the Saxon towns, went down to Magdeburg. But on his arrival he was seized by the revolutionaries, put in a car, and sent off to Brunswick to be held to ransom. This kidnapping of the reactionary Minister of Justice, second only to Noske himself in importance, was a score for the revolution. But a red Jew is kittle cattle to drive. Landsberg escaped from his captors, and within a few days General Maerker and his merry men were marching on Magdeburg from Halle. Magdeburg was occupied after slight resistance, and became the base for operations against Brunswick. Only a _casus belli_ was required and this was supplied when Brunswick, encouraged by the Munich revolution, proclaimed a "Rate Republik," and invited the Saxon towns to rally to the revolution and the "Soviet system."

This was immediately countered by the officials and clerks of Brunswick organising a strike that crippled the Prussian railway and the German postal and telegraph system. Whereupon Berlin declared that it had ground for intervention in Brunswick, the State frontier was closed and Frei-Corps expeditions advanced from Magdeburg and Hanover.

Skirmishes occurred at Helmstadt, Borsum and Wolfenb.u.t.tel and both sides had losses. Brunswick called off the general strike, protested against the violation of State right and tried to make terms. There followed a pause in the operations during which the moderates on both sides were trying to arrange matters. Meantime the Communists and Council revolutionaries of Brunswick were preparing resistance, in the confidence that the revolutionaries of the Saxon towns would rise in the rear of the troops; while the reactionaries were mobilising rapidly tanks and howitzers with the intention of giving the Revolution the _coup de grace_. It was at this moment that I decided to go to Brunswick partly to study its revolutionary inst.i.tutions before they were wiped out, partly to prevent bloodshed if possible by informing the revolutionary leaders as to the small prospect of Brunswick, if it resisted, getting any support from Saxony or Prussia.

It was not an easy journey and the following account of it from my diary may serve as an ill.u.s.tration of Germany at this time.

_Monday Evening._--The notorious Eden Hotel, headquarters of the Berlin garrison and military police. I am waiting for a permit to go with the expedition against Brunswick. When I went with the same troops against Halle a month ago I got my permit from Noske himself, but the captain in charge at the Eden Hotel is only second in real importance to the War Minister. There is, I suppose, a War Office and General Staff still, with generals and colonels, but the Government is based on the volunteer corps and they are run from the Eden Hotel. And now Brunswick, not for the first time, has championed the cause of German revolution and challenged Berlin, which has become, not for the first time, the centre of German reaction. And Berlin has determined to bash the head of revolution in Brunswick as it broke its back in Halle. True, Brunswick is a free State with its own const.i.tution, which only differs from that of Prussia in preserving the principles of the November revolution; but it has become a centre of revolutionary opposition connecting the industrial districts of Westphalia with those of Saxony. There has been a plan for concerted action. Brunswick has given the signal too soon and realised its mistake too late. Brunswick, says the Eden Hotel, will fight in the hope of support from the Saxon towns, not knowing that they will not rise, for it has been isolated for a week.