THE FRENCH IN THE RUHR.
BY AN EYE-WITNESS.
IS it possible that four years can have elapsed since the end of that Great War which was to end war ? Watch the stream of weeping fugitives stumbling along the road bearing with them such sticks of furniture or clothing as they can carry. There are women and children, sick people, old people, and infants in arms. In 1914 a similar stream flowed from east to west, the Belgians and French refugees fleeing from the Germans. In 1923 this stream of misery flows from west to east; it is the German refugees in the Ruhr district fleeing from the French and Belgians. In 1914 the generous-hearted bus ned with noble indignation at the pitiful sight, houses we e thrown open to the fugitives, national funds were raised, orphans adopted, people vied with one another to supply their need. In 1928 no one cares. Have there been too many tragedies since that fateful August, nine years ago, so that no tale of misery, however hopeless, can touch our hearts ? Is it possible that we have become so numb and paralysed that only deeds which touch our pockets can sting us into action ? Or is it that our thoughts are occupied with what we are going to do in the summer holidays, or who is going to win the St. Leger, so that we really do not know what is happening over there in the Ruhr ? Or can it be that we arc afraid of being called " pro-German " ? It is even less necessary to be afraid of an " anti-French " label, for the more we care for the French the more distressed we must be at their inhuman conduct in the German territory occupied by them. If we must have a label, let us call ourselves " pro-Europe."
Some of the daily occurrences in the Ruhr are an outrage on anyone's sense of justice. Let any Englishman who likes visit the German territory occupied by the French and every moment of the day he will grind his teeth at his impotence. It is terrible to watch the process of disintegration, to see a great country slipping down, every day a step nearer the abyss, gaining impetus as she slides. Terrible deeds are being done in the Ruhr in the name of the Allies, and it is more than time that we as a nation should repudiate our share in them. During the occupation, January—July, 60,000 people of every social class have been expelled from their homes and are wandering about, penniless, and dependent for their daily needs on dole or charity. 60,000 is a large number. What is their crime ? Some of them have refused to work for the French, some of them are the dependents of those who have refused, and so their money, their houses, and their property have been seized, and they themselves have been expelled.
Is it a crime to refuse to work for a foreign invader ? If Hampshire and Sussex, for instance, were seized, one cannot help wondering how many Englishmen would consent to work for the enemy. The plight of those that remain is even worse than that of those who have been expelled. A reign of terror has been established, martial law prevails, private as well as public property has been seized, traffic is suspended, business is at a standstill, starvation, that grimmest of deaths, menaces the population. The English papers give brief notices of some of these occurrences, but only those on the spot sec the significance of them. Here is an example. One Saturday two German cashiers brought a cart to the Bank to fetch money to pay the wages of the workmen belonging to a large factory. The packets of notes, amounting to several milliards of marks, were being put into the cart when the whole sum was seized by the French and appropriated. It makes but a short report in the newspaper, but anyone with imagination can visualize the misery in those little homes when the man of the family returns in blank despair to say that there will be no wages that week. Everything has already been sold that is saleable, there are already only too many shops where pathetic worthless little treasures are on sale.
The French still appear to believe that this form of pressure will make the Ruhr workmen give in. Never! No more than an Englishman would in a like case. No more than the French themselves did in the Great War. It hardens the German's heart and makes him set his teeth and resolve to bear anything rather than give in to the invader who has seized his country, without even the pretext of war. The list, of Germans shot by French snipers has now, it is said, reached about 100. If it happens that there is a contravention of French regulations, it matters nothing to some of the militarist fire-eaters whether the offender was aware of the regulations or not. One Sunday afternoon a certain town in the Ruhr was put under martial law. Sunday is a day when every German who can manage it goes for an excursion or a long walk in the country, and several of these pleasure-seekers came back in the evening quite ignorant of the order that had been given since their departure early that morning. Ignorance was no excuse. Six of them were shot dead by snipers and many were severely wounded. The curfew in Duisberg is at present at 8 p.m., and anyone leaving his house after that hour, be it even an anxious husband fetching the doctor for his wife in child-bed, is liable to be shot at sight. Even the windows have to be shut at 8 p.m., which, during the present heat wave, is an additional hardship to those who live in small, crowded workmen's cottages.
One wishes that the writer of the headlines in the Daily Mail the other day, who wrote about the joys of life in " Jolly Germany," could have looked beyond the group of profiteers and foreigners of every nationality who are battening on the fall of the mark in Berlin, and visited the markets of the poorer districts of Germany.
There he would have seen women weeping because the price of bread had gone up so high that they could not afford to buy it for their families. Meat, a small quantity of which is necessary for the miner and labourer doing heavy manual work, is 100,000 marks a pound. Milk is 15,000 marks a litre, and all other prices are in accordance. A tiny piece of soap costs 12,000 marks—it is very bitter for those who have always kept their children clean and respectable to forgo the last remnants of decency. These are the current prices for the third week of July. The wages for this week are 200,000 marks a week for unskilled labourers, 400,000 for skilled labourers. One pound of meat would therefore be a quarter of the latter's whole weekly wage. The writer in the Daily Mail has recently been writing on the absurdly low prices of German postage, but he makes the mistake of comparing them with English prices, according to the value of the mark in London. This comparison is theoretic ; the real test is to compare them with the rate of the weekly wage, when postage will be found in comparison very high. If that writer in the " London edition of the Paris Daily Mail," as it has been aptly called, had watched as I have the children coming out of school with little legs like match sticks and white wistful faces, if he had watched the lean, hungry-looking students at the Universities, if he had seen, as I have, the woman of gentle breeding slink round early in the morning to see if there was anything to eat in the garbage pails put out for clearance, if he knew anything of the shifts the professional classes are being put to to live at all, the difficulties of the smaller tradesmen, clerks, governesses, teachers, to keep their heads above water, if he went with an unprejudiced mind in the tramcars in the working-class districts, if, above all, he only knew how near the cracking point is, I think he would change his views about " Jolly Germany." All the French are doing is to goad the population into a longing for revenge that cannot die for generations. Surely the last war might have taught the futility of hate as a mainspring of life. It cannot buy progress, happiness, civilization, truth or righteous dealing.
This article, which has only been able to touch on the fringe of the tragedies which are happening, is not meant as a reply to those who say " Are they suffering and starving ? Jolly good thing, too ; let them starve ! " There is no answer to that kind of mentality. My article is meant rather to stimulate those who say "Are they suffering ? I don't believe it. Everything is exaggerated," to inquire into the truth for themselves. In 1914 people were blind up to August 4th. They shut their eyes and refused to believe what was surely coming. And now, nine years later, just as certainly, famine, anarchy, pestilence, war, are coming ; and unless something is done to avert them they will be upon us by Christmas, and probably sooner.
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