This Unwanted War
Personal Testimony on Foreign Outlook by Correspondent Just Returned from Long Experience Abroad
FATE OR HITLER has cheated the peoples of Europe out of a peace that when war came proved to be the thing the 400,000,000 inhabitants of the continent valued more than anything else.
The circumstance that impressed the political reporter assigned this summer to travel from European capital to capital was the almost total absence of faith in any nation that a war would benefit them in any way. I, for one, do not know what Hitler thought about it but I think I do know what the Germans thought and still think from the ordinary citizen to high government officials.
There are a few experiences you do not forget even as a newspaperman pledged to forget every story as soon as it has hit the cables. One of them for the few of us who were on the Wilhelmplatz before the German Chancellory that day was the reception of Hitler's announcement his troops had marched into Poland.
The Fuehrer had been to the Reichstag meeting in the Kroll Opera and made his speech. It had been broadcast over Germany and his people knew that German troops were already over the Polish border and the war to give Germany her rightful place in the sun was on.
The occasion called for a demonstration. The preparations at the Reich Chancellory were made in the fashion familiar to everyone who has lived in Berlin under the National Socialist regime. Black coat Hitler Elite guardsmen and police lined the square to keep the throngs in order. The throngs never came. Movie camera cars moved up and got ready. The French window opening onto the balcony where Hitler makes his public appearances was opened.
On the square some eight hundred people milled around.
Finally the Elite Guard gave the signal, They began to shout in unison: "We want to see our Fuehrer."
Always the crowd joins in. People gather from the surrounding streets and finally the Fuehrer appears.
This time the crowd did not join in. It remained perfectly silent. It did not want to see its Fuehrer. It merely stood there quiet and depressed, staring stolidly at the facade of the Chancellory.
That was the beginning of the war in Berlin. After a while the guards dispersed. The window through which the Fuehrer was to have made his appearance was quietly closed.
Wherever you went on that sunny September day, you encountered the same depression and the same nostalgic talk about the peace that was gone. It was like a funeral where everybody tells you what a fine old fellow the corpse was.
During the two preceding weeks I had passed through Rome, Paris and London in rather rapid succession. The impression had been essentially the same. The people of Europe, whatever its leaders may think, has outgrown war. The second cataclysm in one generation is one too many.
This war is being fought against another background different from 1914.
Every European who has a little to do with business and money knows that Europe is broke. How incredibly broke you discover by going from one finance ministry to another and from banker to banker around the circuit. It is a dismal story.
Several European countries will soon surpass their indebtedness of 1918. A year before the war began, before the last outbreak of breakneck rearmament, the nations of Europe were spending on armaments each year more than a tenth of the total cost of the world war which included a great many things besides the arms item.
Up to a certain point you can eat your cake and have it too because of the pump priming effects of any large public expenditures on national income but the time comes, naturally, when it ceases. A lot of experts were telling you sadly this year that the moment was approaching when the system would start to press on the standard of living and the economic result would be another crisis, unemployment, bankruptcies and new government deficits.
The upshot of what is happening is that Europe is headed for a general impoverishment. This collapse, if it comes, will be the third in a quarter of a century. The last war pretty well ruined Europe. The recent crisis hit it hard. Now the debts are piling up higher than they have ever been and the money is being spent for guns that are incapable of producing a penny's worth of income.
The threat that appears on the horizon of still free or partially free Europe is that another impoverishment will bring a degree of government control of the business of earning a living that will end up in political dictatorship.
Before the war broke out in fact there was a good deal of worry about what would happen if Europe could cease arming. Armaments had become the backbone of European prosperity such as it was.
On the League of Nations agenda for its next meeting several states had placed a discussion of what would come when the armament boom ceased and peace returned. The problem has solved itself with the outbreak of war but the inevitable adjustment has only been postponed with Europe's eggs more than ever all in Mars' basket.
When Krupp ceased producing arms in 1918 employment fell in a few months from 180,000 to 48,000. The Skoda works fired fifty per cent of its employees. Neither Krupp nor Skoda was primarily an armaments works despite the legend. Both had been big producers of peace purposes steel goods.
HAND-TO-MOUTH FINANCE
There is a good deal of myth about the supposed stability of several European states. There is no reason, for example, to believe that France can take the shock of the economic holocaust that is coming when this war ends.
The French problem is that every second Frenchman now dies without leaving anything that could be called property and does not like it.
The inheritance registration statistics and various estimates of the distribution of wealth in France have long ago exploded the good old tale that the French are a nation where every little man has his piece of ground or his petty fortune. The great chance of getting enough together to guarmajority of Frenchmen never have any antee security in their old age.
The Blum socialist experiment which paralyzed France for a couple of years was the rebellion of an essentially middle class people determined to have economic independence against this state of affairs. The British have the highest tax rate in the world and it's rising. On top of that Britain has a special problem. A good deal of its chance of prosperity depends upon preserving some forty billion pounds in foreign investments gathered together during the rich century before the world war.
During the last war it had to sacrifice ten billion pounds of that nest egg to win. The great boom in the twenties made it possible to salt away nine billion once more, but when will there be another epoch like that for Britain?
The interest from those foreign investments have meant bread and butter to worker and maidservant on the little island in the northern seas. Another long war will leave Britain hungrier than she has been since the industrial revolution.
It is in fact this fear of the poverty that is coming that chiefly makes the present war so unpopular in Europe. I have had young Germans say to me: "Why not die at the front. There will be nothing left to live for after it's over anyway."
For Germany in fact there seems almost no way out. Before the war they were telling you in Berlin the "frozen inflation" had to halt or the whole country would lose its economic equilibrium.
Germans are very careful how much they reveal to a foreigner, chiefly out of patriotism, partly out of fear. Nevertheless, the rash of financial and economic literature that is appearing in the book shops produced by responsible people refers constantly to the "strain" which the Reich was undergoing before there was any war.
The government has stuffed the credit system full of a lot of paper that is nothing but a bet that the national income would keep up to new high levels and an adequate fund of savings be made available. Germany has no financial resource she could even confiscate. The savings of the people have all been mobilized and she lives from hand to mouth.
PRESSURE AND PUTSCHES
The structure is kept together by the price control policy. There have been no normal signs of inflation, namely skyrocketing prices, simply because the government will not permit price increases and closes every avenue by which the public as a whole could show normal response to the financial situation of the nation.
There seems a good deal of reason to believe, in fact, that this unhappy economic situation is what drove Germany to march into Bohemia and into Poland. The
totalitarian system can be shored up by spreading the base and taking in new territories and new resources. The maneuver worked in the case of Austria best because Austria brought both iron and timber but Prague contributed a healthy gold reserve and Poland the production of the Upper Silesian mines which has become the basis of wartime trade with the southeast.
None of its conquests have cured Germany's economic disease, however. Probably nothing can.
Apparently only one man in Europe grasped the point that the great European states have entered a war that is more likely than anything else to send them all into revolution and a half century of grinding poverty and chose to take his profit while the taking is good.
Three weeks after the war started when I sailed from Europe, it was already pretty well recognized that Stalin had won the war and that no one else is going to win.
Peace when it comes must be a peace imposed by the Soviet Union. Moscow is not even under the necessity of fighting to bring about the showdown it desires.
The slogan of the entire German nation has become:
"Britain might starve us out but they can't starve out Russia."
This presupposes, however, that the Russians are really going to help. Delayed deliveries and failure to increase petty quotas of raw materials which the Soviet have now agreed to sell to Germany would mean as much as a military campaign in bringing Hitler to his knees.
Daily the Russian position strengthens. Moscow can afford to adopt, as things stand, any policy they see fit. They hold the Polish Ukraine, gateway to the Soviet Ukraine. They hold the Baltic flank. They hold the Polish marshes.
What has happened, in fact, is not that Germany has destroyed the European balance of power, but that the Soviet now controls the balance instead of Britain.
The Soviet can do without either party, but neither can do without the Soviet. Herr Hitler, founder of the anticommintern, self appointed guardian of the west against Bolshevism, has made Soviet Russia the deciding factor on the European scene.
The anticommintern is now only the butt of professional wits.
Russia's enemy Japan has been isolated. I was told in Japan in the summer of 1938 that only one thing was inevitable—the Japanese Soviet war. Last autumn the Japanese Minister of War publicly warned the heavy industries to prepare for the Soviet war.
Today Tokio is walking very softly. The Soviet war is no longer inevitable. I am told on the contrary it is very bad form just now in Tokio even to mention war and the Soviet together.
The German people have done their best to acclimate themselves to the new world they have created. With no help from the official propaganda they worked out the idea that National Socialists and Communists are all fundamentally socialists and the real enemy is "plutodemocracy." It is the most popuplar idea circulating in Germany at the moment but it is not sufficient to reassure an anxious nation.
Fear of Russian restlessness in its now dominant position haunts Germany like the thought of an unpaid debt. Germany never wanted to strengthen the Russian colossus. Berlin's "drang nach osten," drive to the east, becomes nonsense with an ever more powerful Russia playing the role of protector in the same region. It seems like a Pollyanna attitude to take
but no one will be very foolish to make the guess that this war is never going to be fought out. Europe has made a mess of it and Europe knows it. Germany can make peace with the offer of a half decent Polish settlement and a little liberty for the Czechs. There may be peace before spring.
FOREIGN EDITOR, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
THE AUTHOR, Albion Ross, is amember of the class of 1929. Hewas a reporter on the Altoona(Penn.) Tribune for a year aftergraduation, then studied abroad,and 1931-34 was a Berlin correspondent for the New York Evening Post. He held a similar assignmentin Berlin for the New York Times, 1934-38, spent the summer of 1938in the Orient, and has more recently been foreign editor of theSan Francisco Chronicle. Mr. Rosscovered the pre-war period fromvarious capitals and spetit the firstweeks of the war in Berlin beforereturning to San Francisco early inOctober.—ED.
