Vilma°. and Sage
By ALFRED E. ZIMMERN Or the nine biographical sketches in this volume two are of exceptional interest : for they bring us face to face with men of our own day, one, happily, still living and the other only lately gone, who are, in the completest sense of the word, Heroes. Neither of them sought what the world calls greatness : both indeed were not only indifferent to it but positively shunned it. Yet such was the power of their personality that it imposed itself upon their own peoples and upon the world, so that they won the love and devotion of millions. Their careers, so different in externals, so alike in fundamentals, prove once more—since proof seems to be needed in these days—that not only are democracy and leadership not incompatible, but that also the truest and finest leadership is that which is in closest touch with the heart and mind of the common people.
Two anecdotes told in this volume are typical. Three years after Nansen had been in Russia during the famine, the author mentioned his name to an old peasant woman on a Volga steamer. " She made the sign of the Cross and asked me with wide-open eyes whether I knew him. When I nodded, she touched my chest with her hand, in a gesture which meant that I .was to convey her blessing to him." Not long before Gorguloff assassinated President Doumer he approached Masaryk's car with the same purpose in view. " He proffered a book as a feint to cover the gesture of raising the revolver. But in the act of doing so, as he confessed later, he was so struck by the friendly look in Masaryk's eyes that he could not possibly lift the weapon with which he had meant to shoot."
Nansen was a modern Viking. Born on the edge of the forest near the fiords, he loved to be alone with animals and with Nature. Town-life was abhorrent to him. He was 27 when, inspired by the exploits of the explorer Nor- denskioeld, he determined to attempt what was considered to be the mad project of crossing Greenland on snow-shoes. There he acquired his first knowledge of a foreign people, the Eskimo, and their cause was the first of the many that he pleaded. Soon after he married a kindred spirit : the first months of his married life were spent studying Nature and writing his Greenland book " in a shed where no human being had yet lived and where the water in the wash-basins became frozen night after night." Then the lure of the Pole gripped him and he left his young wife for what turned out to be a three years' voyage. During part of that time he was away from the ship alone on the ice with one of his men. They had been nine months together before Nansen could make up his mind to address him in the familiar second person singular. He returned and became celebrated. In the crisis that led to Norway's independence in 1905, he came out of his retirement to oppose the hotheads and urge a peaceful solution. The new State needed him, and he consented to become its first Minister in London. But he still longed for the lonely spaces. When Amundsen pro- jected his voyage to the South Pole, Nansen at once promised him his own vessel, the famous From'. He told his son later that when he watched Amundsen sail out on her without him it was the bitterest hour of his life.
This was the man whom the War transformed from a Viking with a sense of public duty and a tenderness for the Eskimo into a Crusader on behalf of millions of broken men and women. Being in Paris in April, 1919, to negotiate for Norway's entry into the League, at a time when Russia was only thought of as a centre of political controversy, he heard of the famine there.
Leaders of Europe. By Emil Ludwig. (Ivor Nicholson and Watson. 18s.) He wrote a letter to each of the Big Four, urging the need for relief and outlining a plan. The result. was that he was invited, not indeed to help the starving—nothing was done for them for two years—but to bring home the prisoners of war. Very reluctantly he consented. Thus began a series of efforts the results of which, in bare figures, can only be described as stupendous. This philanthropist from a small neutral country restored nearly half a million prisoners to their peoples, rescued several millions from famine in Russia, conducted the exchange of a million Greek and Turkish refugees, organized the transport of the Bulgarian deportees, and arranged the return home of 300,000 persecuted Armenians. All this he did, not as an " unknown organizer, sitting among documents and secretaries and travelling in a special train," but going amongst those whom he helped and suffering privations with them. " He was a veritable Christ," says the author, " in the love of his neighbour." And he was not least Christ-like when at Geneva he turned upon the representatives of the govern- ments who found excuses for refusing to help him with a sorrowful indignation which still rings through the official record of his last address to more than half-empty benches at the Assembly of 1929. The failure of the Great Powers to endorse his Armenian scheme undoubtedly shortened his life. He went back to his scientific work—to Nature and the ani- mals. Within a few months he was dead.
Masaryk was the son of a coachman and a serving-maid, who were serfs on one of the Moravian estates of the Emperor Francis Joseph. He went to work early, but at sixteen he was called back by one of his former teachers to help at the village school. Thence he found his way, through various patrons, to the secondary school at the provincial capital and, at 22, to Vienna University. From Vienna he went to Leipzig, where he met Charlotte Garrigue, daughter of a Boston bookseller. To win the consent of her parents to their marriage he had to travel to America. Of this remarkable woman, with whom he lived for nearly fifty years, Masaryk said to the author : " I taught her much, but she it was who shaped me." Certainly without Charlotte Garrigue there would be no Czecho-Slovakia : for the minds of Masaryk and Woodrow Wilson would not have met. Masaryk is the only living thinker whose range of understanding extends from the Slav world across the whole of Europe to the English-speaking peoples overseas.
Both as a University teacher and as a deputy in the Vienna Parliament Masaryk was uncompromisingly inde- pendent, always ready to take up an unpopular cause when principle demanded it. He denounced as a forgery a supposed mediaeval document proclaiming the national destiny of the Czech people. He defended the Southern Slays at the famous Zagreb trial, proving that the case for the Crown against them was based on fabricated documents. Yet as late as 1913 lie was working for conciliation between the Dual Monarchy and the Southern Slays. It was only after the outbreak of the War that he came to the conclusion that the Dual Monarchy was doomed. He left Prague for Italy in November, 1914, jumping on to the departing train at the frontier while his passport was being examined. He returned as President of the Czecho-Slovak Republic in December, 1918. The story, of his outer and inner life during those four years is told in what will very likely live in history as the greatest book dealing with the World War.
One chapter in it—the account of Masaryk's triumphant homeward voyage across the Atlantic—recalls the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Let no one say that there is not still wisdom in our time.
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