Dateline- Toronto

by Ernest Hemingway

  “We came to Lausanne with one program,” Tchitcherin said to me one afternoon. “And we will leave it with the same program. The straits, both the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, must be closed to warships.”

  He spoke with the tired intensity of a man who is saying a thing for the hundredth time, who believes it and is as impassioned about it as the first time, but has become wearied from not being understood.

  “As long as the straits are open to warships,” he went on, “Russia is at the mercy of any nation that sends a fleet into the Black Sea. We can have no safety, no freedom to develop, no security from invasion as long as battleships and dreadnoughts can enter the Black Sea. There is only one thing for Russia to do if warships are allowed to enter, and that is to arm. She must build battleships in order to have a great fleet in the Black Sea. That means the crippling of her productive powers by diverting it to building a great navy. But she must do it.”

  “How about naval disarmament?” I asked.

  “Russia was not invited to the Washington Conference,” Tchitcherin shrugged his shoulders. “And what has come of that conference? How near are we to naval disarmament now? We are dealing with facts, with conditions as they exist. Russia would be the first to accept an invitation to a naval disarmament conference, but until we have complete naval disarmament, we can only keep warships out of the Black Sea in one way. That way is to have the straits closed to all warships and fortified by the Turks so they can enforce the closing.”

  Tchitcherin was on his best ground now. He is an old Russian diplomat and he is soundest when he is fighting for the national aims of Russia. He sees that the problems of Soviet Russia, the territorial and national problems, are the same as they were under the Russian empire. The world revolution did not come off and Russia faces the same problems she always faced. Tchitcherin knows those problems. He knows the rivalry between Russia and Great Britain in the east and he knows that as long as Russia is a nation, no matter who governs, and as long as there is a British empire, their interests will conflict. Now he is trying to gain by treaties advantages and securities that later would have to be gained or lost by wars.

  Tchitcherin knows that a Russian invasion of India through Afghanistan would be impossible as long as the Crimea was open to a counter-invasion by the British fleet. Lord Curzon knows that too. Tchitcherin knows that the Black Sea coast is the great thousand-mile Achilles tendon of Russia. Lord Curzon knows that too.

  It was this daily, bitter struggle between the British empire and the future Russian empire with Curzon, a tall, cold, icicle of a man holding the whip hand with the British fleet, and Tchitcherin fighting, fighting, with arguments, historical instances, facts, statistics and impassioned pleas and finally, seeing it was hopeless, simply talking for history, registering his objections for future generations to read, that made the Lausanne conference so interesting. It is this same unreconcilable difference between Russia and Great Britain that will run like a crack through the Near East treaty that is made in Lausanne and keep it from having permanence.

  With his cold hands and his cold brain and his red wispy beard, his inhuman capacity for work, his dislike and distrust of women, his indifference to publicity, public opinion, money or anything except his work and Russia, Tchitcherin looked like a man without a weakness. Then came the pictures that accompany this article.

  Tchitcherin, you must know, has never been a soldier. He is timid, personally. He does not fear assassination, but he would turn pale if you shook your fist under his nose. Until he was twelve years old his mother kept him in dresses. He is all brain and he simply feeds his body because it is a supporting part of his brain.

  Several of us knew all this about him. Then one Sunday morning as the churches were emptying in Lausanne and the mountain goers were hiking down the streets with their skis and packs to catch the train to Aigle or the Diablerets, a group of correspondents stopped in front of a photographer’s window. It was displaying the photographs you see here.

  “They’re faked,” one man said. “Why he’s never had a uniform on in his life.”

  We all looked closely at the photographs.

  “Nope. They’re not faked,” someone said. “I can tell. They’re not faked. Let’s go and ask Slocombe.”

  We found George Slocombe, the correspondent of the London Daily Herald, who is Tchitcherin’s very good friend and sometimes his mouthpiece. George was sitting in the pressroom of the Lausanne Palace Hotel, his big black sombrero back on his head, his curling red beard sticking out at an angle, his pipe in his mouth.

  “Yes,” he said, looking at the picture I showed him, “aren’t they awful? I couldn’t believe it when I saw them. He had them taken himself, and now the photographer is selling them.”

  “But where does he get that awful uniform, George?” I asked. “He looks like a combination of the head keeper at Sing Sing and the concierge at the Crillon.”

  “Isn’t it horrible?” George sucked his pipe. “All the commissars are automatically generals in the Red Army, and Tchitcherin is commissar for foreign affairs, you know. He got that uniform in Berlin. He took it off the hanger last night in the closet in his room and showed it to me. He is dreadfully proud of it. You ought to see him in it.”

  So that is Tchitcherin’s weakness. The boy who was kept in dresses until he was twelve years old always wanted to be a soldier. And soldiers make empires and empires make wars.

  The Franco-German Situation

  The Toronto Daily Star

  April 14, 1923

  PARIS.—To write about Germany you must begin by writing about France. There is a magic in the name France. It is a magic like the smell of the sea or the sight of blue hills or of soldiers marching by. It is a very old magic.

  France is a broad and lovely country. The loveliest country that I know. It is impossible to write impartially about a country when you love it. But it is possible to write impartially about the government of that country. France refused in 1917 to make a peace without victory. Now she finds that she has a victory without peace. To understand why this is so we must take a look at the French government.

  France at present is governed by a Chamber of Deputies elected in 1919. It was called the “horizon blue” parliament and is dominated by the famous “bloc national,” or wartime coalition. This government has two more years to run.

  The Liberals, who were the strongest group in France, were disgraced when Clemenceau destroyed their government in 1917 on the charge that they were negotiating for peace without victory from the Germans. Caillaux, admitted the best financier in France, the Liberal premier, was thrown into prison. There were almost-daily executions by firing squads of which no report appeared in the papers. Very many enemies of Clemenceau found themselves standing blindfolded against a stone wall at Versailles in the cold of the early morning while a young lieutenant nervously moistened his lips before he could give the command.

  This Liberal group is practically unrepresented in the Chamber of Deputies. It is the great, unformed, unled opposition to the “bloc national” and it will be crystallized into form at the next election in 1924. You cannot live in France any length of time without having various people tell you in the strictest confidence that Caillaux will be prime minister again in 1924. If the occupation of the Ruhr fails he has a very good chance to be. There will be the inevitable reaction against the present government. The chance is that it will swing even further to the left and pass over Caillaux entirely to exalt Marcel Cachin, the Communist leader.

  The present opposition to the “bloc national” in the Chamber of Deputies is furnished by the left. When you read of the right and the left in continental politics it refers to the way the members are seated in parliament. The conservatives are on the right, the monarchists are on the extreme right of the floor. The radicals are on the left. The Communists are on the extreme left. The extreme Communists are on the outside seats of the extreme left.

  The French Communist party has 12 seats in
the chamber out of 600. Marcel Cachin, editor of L’Humanité, with a circulation of 200,000, is the leader of the party. Vaillant Coutourier, a young subaltern of Chasseurs who was one of the most decorated men in France, is his lieutenant. The Communists led the opposition to M. Poincaré. They charge him with having brought on the war, with having desired the war; they always refer to him as “Poincaré la guerre.” They charge him with being under the domination of Léon Daudet and the Royalists. They charge him with being under the domination of the iron kings, the coal kings; they charge him with many things, some of them very ridiculous.

  M. Poincaré sits in the chamber with his little hands and little feet and his little white beard and when the Communists insult him too far, spits back at them like an angry cat. When it looks as though the Communists had uncovered any real dirt and members of the government begin to look doubtfully at M. Poincaré, René Viviani makes a speech. M. Viviani is the greatest orator of our times. You have only to hear M. Viviani pronounce the words “la gloire de France” to want to rush out and get into uniform. The next day after he has made his speech you find it posted up on posters all over the city.

  Moscow has recently “purified” the French Communist party. According to the Russian Communists the French party was mawkishly patriotic and weak-willed. All members who refused to place themselves directly under orders from the central party in Moscow were asked to turn in their membership cards. A number did. The rest are now considered purified. But I doubt if they remain for long. The Frenchman is not a good internationalist.

  The “bloc national” is made up of honest patriots, and representatives of the great steel trust, the coal trust, the wine industry, other smaller profiteers, ex-army officers, professional politicians, careerists, and the Royalists.

  While it may seem fantastic to think of France having a king again, the Royalist party is extremely well organized, is very strong in certain parts of the south of France, controls several newspapers, including L’Action Française, and has organized a sort of Fascisti called the Camelots du Roi. It has a hand in everything in the government and was the greatest advocate of the advance into the Ruhr and the further occupation of Germany.

  There, briefly, are the political parties in France and the way they line up. Now we must see the causes that forced France into the Ruhr.

  France has spent eighty billion francs on reparations. Fortyfive billion francs have been spent on reconstructing the devastated regions. There is a very great scandal talked in France about how that forty-five billions were spent. Deputy Inghies of the Department of the Nord, said the other day in the Chamber of Deputies that twenty-five billions of it went for graft. He offered to present the facts at any time the chamber would consent to hear him. He was hushed up. At any rate forty-five billions were spent wildly and rapidly and there are very many new “devastated region millionaires” in the Chamber of Deputies. The deputies asked for as much money as they wanted for their own districts and got it and a good part of the regions are still devastated.

  The point is that the eighty billions have been spent and are charged up as collectible from Germany. They stand on the credit side of the ledger.

  If at any time the French government admits that any part of those eighty billion francs are not collectible they must be moved over to the bad side of the ledger and listed as a loss rather than an asset. There are only thirty billions of paper francs in circulation today. If France admits that any part of the money spent and charged to Germany is uncollectible she must issue paper francs to pay the bonds she floated to raise the money she has spent. That means inflation in her currency, resulting in starting the franc on the greased skids the Austrian kronen and German mark traveled down.

  When Aristide Briand, former prime minister, who looks like a bandit, and is the natural son of a French dancer and a café keeper of St. Nazaire, agreed at the Cannes Conference to a reduction in reparations in return for Lloyd George’s defense pact, his ministry was overthrown almost before he could catch the train back to Paris. The weasel-eyed M. Arago, leader of the “bloc national,” and Monsieur Barthou, who looks like the left-hand Smith Brother, were at Cannes watching every move of Briand and when they saw he was leaning toward a reduction of reparations they prepared to skid him out and get Poincaré in—and accomplished the coup before Briand knew what was happening to him. The “bloc national” cannot afford to have anyone cutting down on reparations because it does not want any inquiry as to how the money was spent. The memory of the Panama Canal scandal is still fresh.

  Poincaré came into office pledged to collect every sou possible from Germany. The story of how he was led to refuse the offerof the German industrialists to take over the payment of reparations if it was reduced to a reasonable figure, and the sinister tale that is unfolding day by day in the French Chamber of Deputies about how Poincaré was forced into the Ruhr against his own will and judgment, the strange story of the rise of Royalists in France and their influence on the present government will be told in the next article.

  French Royalist Party

  The Toronto Daily Star

  April 18, 1923

  PARIS.—Raymond Poincaré is a changed man. Until a few months ago the little white-bearded Lorraine lawyer in his patent-leather shoes and his gray gloves dominated the French Chamber of Deputies with his methodical accountant’s mind and his spitfire temper. Now he sits quietly and forlornly while fat, white-faced Léon Daudet shakes his finger at him and says “France will do this, France will do that.”

  Léon Daudet, son of old Alphonse Daudet, the novelist, is the leader of the Royalist party. He is also editor of L’Action Française, the Royalist paper, and author of L’Entremetteuse, or The Procuress, a novel whose plot could not even be outlined in any newspaper printed in English.

  The Royalist party is perhaps the most solidly organized in France today. That is a surprising statement to those who think of France as a republic with no thought of ever being anything else. The Royalist headquarters are in Nîmes in the south of France and Provence is almost solidly Royalist. The Royalists have the solid support of the Catholic church. It being an easily understood fact that the church of Rome thrives better under European monarchies than under the French republic.

  Philippe, the Duke of Orleans, is the Royalist’s candidate for king. Philippe lives in England, is a big, good-looking man and rides very well to hounds. He is not allowed by law to enter France.

  There is a Royalist Fascisti called the Camelots du Roi. They carry black loaded canes with salmon-colored handles and at twilight you can see them in Montmartre swaggering along the streets with their canes, a little way ahead and behind a newsboy who is crying L’Action Française in the radical quarter of the old Butte. Newsboys who carry L’Action Française into radical districts without the protecting guard of Camelots are badly beaten up by the Communists and Socialists.

  In the past year the Royalists have received a tremendous impetus in some mysterious way. It has come on so rapidly and suddenly that from being more or less of a joke they are now spoken of as one of the very strongest parties. In fact Daudet is marked for assassination by the extreme radicals and men are not assassinated until they are considered dangerous. An attempt on his life was made by an anarchist a month or so ago. The girl assassin killed his assistant, Marius Plateau, by mistake.

  General [Charles] Mangin, the famous commander of attack troops, nicknamed “The Butcher,” is a Royalist. He was the only great French general who was not made a marshal. He can always be seen in the Chamber of Deputies when Léon Daudet is to speak. It is the only time he comes.

  Now the Royalist party wants no reparations from Germany. Nothing would frighten them more than if Germany should be able to pay in full tomorrow. For that would mean that Germany was becoming strong. What they want is a weak Germany, dismembered if possible, a return to the military glories and conquests of France, the return of the Catholic church, and the return of the king. But being patriotic as a
ll Frenchmen, they first want to obtain security by weakening Germany permanently. Their plan to accomplish this is to have the reparations kept at such a figure that will be unpayable and then seize German territory to be held “only until reparations are paid.”

  The very sinister mystery is how they obtained the hold over M. Poincaré to force him to fall in with their plan and refuse to even discuss the German industrialists’ proposal to take over the payment of reparations if they were reduced to a reasonable figure. The German industrialists have money, have been making money ever since the armistice, have profited by the fall of the mark to sell in pounds and dollars and pay their workers in worthless marks, and have most of their pounds and dollars salted away. But they did not have enough money to pay the reparations as they were listed, and they wanted to make some sort of a final settlement with the French.

  Now, we must get back to the little white-whiskered Raymond Poincaré, who has the smallest hands and feet of any man I have ever seen, sitting in the chair at the Chamber of Deputies, while the fat, white-faced Léon Daudet, who wrote the obscene novel and leads the Royalists and is marked for assassination, shakes his finger at him and says, “France will do this. France will do that.”

  To understand what is going on we must remember that French politics is unlike any other. It is a very intimate politics, a politics of scandal. Remember the duels of Clemenceau, the Calmette killing, the figure of the last president of the French republic [Deschanel] standing in a fountain at the Bois and saying: “Oh, don’t let them get me. Don’t let them get me.”