Dateline- Toronto

by Ernest Hemingway

  I have described that evacuation in a cable to the Star from Adrianople. It does no good to go over it again. The evacuation still keeps up. No matter how long it takes this letter to get to Toronto, as you read this in the Star you may be sure that the same ghastly, shambling procession of people being driven from their homes is filing in unbroken line along the muddy road to Macedonia. A quarter of a million people take a long time to move.

  Adrianople itself is not a pleasant place. Dropping off the train at 11 o’clock at night, I found the station a mud hole crowded with soldiers, bundles, bedsprings, bedding, sewing machines, babies, broken carts, all in the mud and the drizzling rain. Kerosene flares lit up the scene. The stationmaster told me he had shipped fifty-seven cars of retreating troops to Western Thrace that day. The telegraph wires were all out. There were more troops piling up and no means to evacuate them.

  Madame Marie’s, the stationmaster said, was the only place in town where a man could sleep. A soldier guided me to Madame Marie’s down the dark side streets. We walked through mud puddles and waded around sloughs that were too deep to go through. Madame Marie’s was dark.

  I banged on the door and a Frenchman in bare feet and trousers opened it. He had no room but I could sleep on the floor if I had my own blankets. It looked bad.

  Then a car rolled up outside, and two moving picture operators, with their chauffeur, came in. They had three cots and asked me to spread my blankets on one. The chauffeur slept in the car. We all turned in on the cots and the taller of the movie men, who was called “Shorty,” told me they had had an awful trip coming up from Rodosto on the Sea of Marmora.

  “Got some swell shots of a burning village today.” Shorty pulled off the other boot. “Shoot it from two or three directions and it looks like a regular town on fire. Gee I’m tired. This refugee business is hell all right. Man sure sees awful things in this country.” In two minutes he was snoring.

  I woke up about one o’clock with a bad chill, part of my Constantinople-acquired malaria, killed mosquitoes who had supped too heavily to fly away from my face, waited out the chill, took a big dose of aspirin and quinine and went back to sleep. Repeated the process along toward morning. Then Shorty woke me.

  “Say, boy, look at the film box.” I looked at it. It was crawling with lice. “Sure are hungry. Going after my film. Sure are hungry little fellows.”

  The cots were alive with them. I have been lousy during the war, but I have never seen anything like Thrace. If you looked at any article of furniture, or any spade on the wall steadily for a moment you saw it crawl, not literally crawl, but move in greasy, minute specks.

  “They wouldn’t hurt a man,” Shorty said. “They’re just little fellows.”

  “These fellows are nothing. You ought to see the real grownup variety at Lule Burgas.”

  Madame Marie, a big, slovenly Croatian woman, gave us some coffee and sour black bread in the bare room that served as dining room, salon, hotel office and parlor.

  “Our room was lousy, Madame,” I said cheerfully to make table talk.

  She spread out her hands. “It is better than sleeping in the road? Eh, Monsieur? It is better than that?”

  I agreed that it was, and we went out with Madame standing looking after us.

  Outside it was drizzling. At the end of the muddy side street we were on I could see the eternal procession of humanity moving slowly along the great stone road that runs from Adrianople across the Maritza valley to Karagatch and then divides into other roads that cross the rolling country into Western Thrace and Macedonia.

  Shorty and Company were going a stretch along the stone road in their motorcar en route back to Rodosto and Constantinople and gave me a lift along the stone road past the procession of refugees into Adrianople. All the stream of slow big-wheeled bullock and buffalo carts, bobbing camel trains and sodden, fleeing peasantry were moving west on the road, but there was a thin counterstream of empty carts driven by Turks in ragged, rain-soaked clothes and dirty fezzes which was working back against the main current. Each Turk cart had a Greek soldier in it, sitting behind the driver with his rifle between his knees and his cape up around his neck to keep the rain out. These carts had been commandeered by the Greeks to go back country in Thrace, load up with the goods of refugees and help the evacuation. The Turks looked sullen and very frightened. They had reason to be.

  At the fork of the stone road in Adrianople all the traffic was being routed to the left by a lone Greek cavalryman who sat on his horse with his carbine slung over his back and accomplished the routing by slashing dispassionately across the face with his quirt any horse or bullock that turned toward the right. He motioned one of the empty carts driven by a Turk to turn off to the right. The Turk turned his cart and prodded his bullocks into a shamble. This awoke the Greek soldier guard riding with him, and seeing the Turk turning off the main road, he stood up and smashed him in the small of the back with his rifle butt.

  The Turk, he was a ragged, hungry-looking Turk farmer, fell out of the cart on to his face, picked himself up in terror and ran down the road like a rabbit. A Greek cavalryman saw him running, kicked spurs into his horse and rode the Turk down. Two Greek soldiers and the cavalryman picked him up, smashed him in the face a couple of times, he shouting at the top of his voice all the time, and he was led, bloody-faced and wild-eyed, back to his cart and told to drive on. Nobody in the line of march paid any attention to the incident.

  I walked five miles with the refugee procession along the road, dodging camels, that swayed and grunted along, past flat-wheeled ox carts piled high with bedding, mirrors, furniture, pigs tied flat, mothers huddled under blankets with their babies, old men and women leaning on the back of the buffalo carts and just keeping their feet moving, their eyes on the road and their heads sunken, ammunition mules, mules loaded with stacks of rifles, tied together like wheat sheaves, and an occasional Ford car with Greek staff officers, red eyes grubby from lack of sleep, and always the slow, rain-soaked, shambling, trudging Thracian peasantry, plodding along in the rain, leaving their homes behind.

  When I had crossed the bridge over the Maritza, running a brick-red quarter-mile-wide flood, where yesterday had been a dry riverbed covered with refugee carts, I turned off to the right and cut up side roads to Madame Marie’s to write a cable to the Star. All the wires were cut and I finally got an Italian colonel, who was returning to Constantinople with an Allied commission, to promise to file it for me at the telegraph office there the next day.

  The fever was going strong and Madame Marie brought me a bottle of sickly sweet Thracian wine to take my quinine with.

  “I won’t care when the Turks come,” Madame Marie said, sitting her great bulk down at the table and scratching her chin.

  “Why not?”

  “They’re all the same. The Greeks and Turks and the Bulgars. They’re all the same.” She accepted a glass of the wine. “I’ve seen them all. They’ve all had Karagatch.”

  “Who are the best?” I asked.

  “Nobody. They’re all the same. The Greek officers sleep here and then will come the Turk officers. Someday the Greeks will come back again. They all pay me.” I filled up her glass.

  “But the poor people who are out there in the road.” I could-n’t get the horror of that twenty-mile-long procession out of my mind, and I had seen some dreadful things that day.

  “Oh well.” Madame Marie shrugged. “It is always that way with the people. Toujours la même chose. The Turk has a proverb, you know. He has many good proverbs. ‘It is not only the fault of the axe but of the tree as well.’ That is his proverb.”

  That is his proverb all right.

  “I’m sorry about the lice, Monsieur.” Madame Marie had forgiven me under the influence of the bottle. “But what do you expect? This is not Paris.” She stood up, big and slovenly, and wise as people get wisdom in the Balkans. “Good-bye, Monsieur. Yes, I know 100 drachmas is too much for the bill. But I have the only hotel here. It is better tha
n the street? Eh?”

  Mussolini, Europe’s Prize Bluffer

  The Toronto Daily Star

  January 27, 1923

  LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND.—In the Château de Ouchy, which is so ugly that it makes the Odd Fellows’ Hall of Petoskey, Michigan, look like the Parthenon, are held the sessions of the Lausanne Conference.

  Ouchy is pronounced Ooshy, not Ouchy, and about sixty years ago was a little fishing village of weather-stained houses, a white-painted, pleasant inn with a shady front porch where Byron used to sit resting his bad leg on a chair while he looked out across the blue of Lake Geneva and waited for the supper bell to ring, and an old ruined tower that rose out of the reeds at the edge of the lake.

  The Swiss have torn down the fishing buildings, nailed up a tablet on the inn front porch, hustled Byron’s chair into a museum, filled in the reedy shore with dirt from the excavations for the enormous, empty hotels that cover the slope up the hill to Lausanne, and built the ugliest building in Europe around the old tower. This building, of pressed gray stone, resembles one of the love nests that sauerkraut kings used to build along the Rhine before the war as dream-homes for their sauerkraut queens and embodies all the worst phases of the iron-dog-on-the-lawn school of architecture. A steep hill runs up from the lakeside to the town of Lausanne itself on the hill.

  You can tell when the conference is in session by the rows of limousines parked along the chateau facing the lake. These limousines each bear the flag of their delegation. The Bulgarian and Russian flags are missing. Premier Stambouliski, of Bulgaria, bulks out of the swinging doors of the chateau, looks suspiciously at the two helmeted Swiss policemen, scowls at the crowd and walks off up the hill to his hotel. Stambouliski cannot afford to ride in a limousine, even if he had the money. It would be reported to Sofia and his peasant government would demand an explanation. A few weeks ago he made an impassioned defense in the Bulgarian assembly to a charge by a group of his sheepskin-coated electors that he had been wearing silk socks, not getting up until 9 o’clock in the morning, drinking wine, and becoming corrupted by the slothful life of the city.

  The Russian delegation never know when they are going to be invited to the conference and when excluded, and decided early, in one of their midnight family councils at the Hotel Savoy, that to keep a limousine all the time would be too expensive. A taxi comes up to the door and Arrens, the Cheka man and Bolshevist press agent, comes out, his heavy, dark facing sneering and his one roving eye shooting away out of control. He is followed by Rakovsky and Tchitcherin. Rakovsky, the Ukrainian, has the pale face, wonderfully modeled features, hawk-nosed and tight-lipped, of an old Florentine nobleman.

  Tchitcherin is not as he was at Genoa when he seemed to blink at the world as a man who has come out of darkness into too-strong sunlight. He is more confident now, has a new overcoat, and a better-groomed look, he has been living well in Berlin, and his face is fuller, although he looks the same as ever in profile with his wispy red beard and mustache and his furtive old-clothes-man slouch.

  Everyone wants to see Ismet Pasha but once they have seen him they have no desire to see him again. He is a little dark man, absolutely without magnetism, looking as small and uninteresting as a man can look. He looks more like an Armenian lace seller than a Turkish general. There is something mouse-like about him. He seems to have a genius for being unrecognized. Mustapha Kemal has a face that no one can forget, and Ismet has a face no one can remember.

  I think the solution is that Ismet has a good movie face. I have seen him, in pictures, look stern, commanding, forceful and, in a way, handsome. Anyone who has seen in real life the weak, petulant face of any one of a dozen movie stars who look beautiful on the screen, knows what I mean. Ismet’s face is not weak or petulant, it is simply plain and characterless. I remember seeing Ismet in the first days of the conference come into the Hotel Savoy as a crowd of newspaper correspondents was coming out from one of Tchitcherin’s famous “mass interviews.” Ismet, waiting for the lift, stood in the midst of this crowd of men who had been trying to get appointments to speak with him for days, and not one of them recognized him. He was too unobtrusive.

  It was too good to spoil, but I slipped up and greeted him.

  “It is very funny, this, Excellency,” I said as a couple of correspondents crowded him away from the door of the lift.

  He smiled like a schoolgirl, shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands to his face in a mock gesture of shame. He giggled.

  “Get an appointment to come and talk with me,” he said, shook hands, stepped into the lift and grinned at me. The interview was over.

  When I did interview him we got along very well, as we both spoke such bad French. Ismet concedes his bad knowledge of French, which is a disgrace to an educated Turk, as in Turkey a knowledge of French is as much a social necessity as it is in Russia, by pretending to be deaf. He appreciates a joke, Ismet does, and he smiles delightedly to himself as he curls back in his chair and has the remarks of the great shouted into his ear in Turkish by his secretary.

  The next time I saw Ismet, after I had interviewed him, he was sitting at a table in a jazz dancing palace in Montreux smiling delightedly at the dancers, a pair of large, gray-haired Turks sitting at his table with him looking morosely on while he ate quantities of cakes, drank three cups of tea and made countless jokes in bad French with the waitress who brought the tea. The waitress seemed delighted with Ismet and Ismet with her; they were having a wonderful time. Not a soul in the place had recognized him.

  In contrast to Ismet there was Mussolini. Mussolini is the biggest bluff in Europe. If Mussolini would have me taken out and shot tomorrow morning I would still regard him as a bluff. The shooting would be a bluff. Get hold of a good photo of Signor Mussolini sometime and study it. You will see the weakness in his mouth which forces him to scowl the famous Mussolini scowl that is imitated by every 19-year-old Fascisto in Italy. Study his past record. Study the coalition that Fascismo is between capital and labor and consider the history of past coalitions. Study his genius for clothing small ideas in big words. Study his propensity for dueling. Really brave men do not have to fight duels, and many cowards duel constantly to make themselves believe they are brave. And then look at his black shirt and his white spats. There is something wrong, even histrionically, with a man who wears white spats with a black shirt.

  There is not space here to go into the question of Mussolini as a bluff or as a great and lasting force. Mussolini may last fifteen years or he may be overthrown next spring by Gabriele D’Annunzio, who hates him. But let me give two true pictures of Mussolini at Lausanne.

  The Fascist dictator had announced he would receive the press. Everybody came. We all crowded into the room. Mussolini sat at his desk reading a book. His face was contorted into the famous frown. He was registering Dictator. Being an ex-newspaperman himself he knew how many readers would be reached by the accounts the men in the room would write of the interview he was about to give. And he remained absorbed in his book. Mentally he was already reading the lines of the two thousand papers served by the two hundred correspondents. “As we entered the room the Black Shirt Dictator did not look up from the book he was reading, so intense was his concentration, etc.”

  I tiptoed over behind him to see what the book was he was reading with such avid interest. It was a French-English dictionary—held upside down.

  The other picture of Mussolini as Dictator was on the same day when a group of Italian women living in Lausanne came to the suite of rooms at the Beau Rivage Hotel to present him with a bouquet of roses. There were six women of the peasant class, wives of workmen living in Lausanne, and they stood outside the door waiting to do honor to Italy’s new national hero who was their hero. Mussolini came out of the door in his frock coat, his gray trousers and his white spats. One of the women stepped forward and commenced her speech. Mussolini scowled at her, sneered, let his bigwhited African eyes roll over the other five women and went back into the room. The unattr
active peasant women in their Sunday clothes were left holding their roses. Mussolini had registered Dictator.

  Half an hour later he met Clare Sheridan, who has smiled her way into many interviews, and had time for half an hour’s talk with her.

  Of course the newspaper correspondents of Napoleon’s time may have seen the same things in Napoleon, and the men who worked on the Giornale d’Italia in Caesar’s day may have found the same discrepancies in Julius, but after an intimate study of the subject there seems to be a good deal more of Bottomley, an enormous, warlike, duel-fighting, successful Italian Horatio Bottomley, in Mussolini than there does of Napoleon.

  It isn’t really Bottomley though. Bottomley was a great fool. Mussolini isn’t a fool and he is a great organizer. But it is a very dangerous thing to organize the patriotism of a nation if you are not sincere, especially when you work its patriotism to such a pitch that it offers to loan money to the government without interest. Once the Latin has sunk his money in a business, he wants results and he is going to show Signor Mussolini that it is much easier to be the opposition to a government than to run the government yourself.

  A new opposition will rise, it is forming already, and it will be led by that old, bald-headed, perhaps a little insane but thoroughly sincere, divinely brave swashbuckler, Gabriele D’Annunzio.

  Russian Uniforms

  The Toronto Daily Star

  February 10, 1923

  LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND.—George Tchitcherin comes from a noble Russian family. He has a wispy red beard and mustache, big eyes, a high forehead and walks with a slouch like an old clothes man. He has plump, cold hands that lie in yours like a dead man’s and he talks both English and French with the same accent in a hissing, grating whisper.

  Tchitcherin was an old Czarist diplomat and if Lenin is the Napoleon that made a dictatorship out of the Russian Revolution, Tchitcherin is his Talleyrand. Their careers are both very similar. Both Tchitcherin and Talleyrand were diplomats under the monarchy that preceded their revolution, both were sent abroad as ambassadors under the revolution, both were refused by the countries they were sent to, both were in exile and both became the director of foreign affairs of the dictatorship that followed their revolution.