A few days ago M. André Berthon stood up in the Chamber of Deputies and said: “Poincaré, you are the prisoner of Léon Daudet. I demand to know by what blackmail he holds you. I do not understand why the government of M. Poincaré submits to the dictatorship of Léon Daudet, the Royalist.”
“Tout d’une pièce,” all in one piece, as the Matin described it, Poincaré jumped up and said: “You are an abominable gredin, Monsieur.” Now you cannot call a man anything worse than a gredin, although it means nothing particularly bad in English. The chamber rocked with shouts and catcalls. It looked like the free fight in the cigarette factory when Geraldine Farrar first began to play Carmen. Finally it quieted down sufficiently for M. Poincaré, trembling and gray with rage, to say: “The man who stands in the Tribune dares to say that there exist against me or mine abominable dossiers which I fear to have made public. I deny it.”
M. Berthon said very sweetly: “I have not mentioned any dossiers.” Dossiers are literally bundles of papers. It is the technical name for the French system of keeping all the documents on the case in a big manila folder. To have a dossier against you is to have all the official papers proving a charge held by someone with the power to use them.
In the end M. Berthon was asked to apologize. “I apologize for any outrageous words I may have used.” He did so very sweetly. It took this form: “I only say, Monsieur le Président, that Monsieur Léon Daudet exercises a sort of pressure on your politics.”
This apology was accepted. Poincaré, goaded out of his depression to deny the existence of papers that had not been mentioned, is back in his forlornness. You cannot make charges in France unless you hold the papers in your hands and those that do hold dossiers know how to use them.
Last July in a confidential conversation with a number of British and American newspaper correspondents Poincaré, discussing the Ruhr situation, said: “Occupation would be futile and absurd. Obviously Germany can only pay now in goods and labor.” He was a more cheerful Poincaré in those days.
Meantime the French government has spent 160 million francs (official) on the occupation and Ruhr coal is costing France $200 a ton.
Government Pays for News
The Toronto Daily Star
April 21, 1923
PARIS.—What do the French people think about the Ruhr and the whole German question? You will not find out by reading the French press.
French newspapers sell their news columns just as they do their advertising space. It is quite open and understood. As a matter of fact it is not considered very chic to advertise in the small advertising section of a French daily. The news item is supposed to be the only real way of advertising.
So the government pays the newspapers a certain amount to print government news. It is considered government advertising and every big French daily like Le Matin, Petit Parisien, Echo de Paris, L’Intransigeant, Le Temps receives a regular amount in subsidy for printing government news. Thus the government is the newspapers’ biggest advertising client. But that is all the news on anything the government is doing that the readers of the paper get.
When the government has any special news, as it has at such a time as the occupation of the Ruhr, it pays the papers extra. If any of these enormously circulated daily papers refuse to print the government news or criticize the government standpoint, the government withdraws its subsidy—and the paper loses its biggest advertiser. Consequently the big Paris dailies are always for the government, any government that happens to be in.
When one of them refuses to print the news furnished by the government and begins attacking its policy you may be sure of one thing. That it has not accepted the loss of its subsidy without receiving the promise of a new one and a substantial advance from some government that it is absolutely sure will get into power shortly. And it has to be awfully sure it is coming off before it turns down its greatest client. Consequently when one of these papers whose circulation mounts into millions starts an attack on the government it is time for the politicians in power to get out their overshoes and put up the storm windows.
All of these things are well-known and accepted facts. The government’s attitude is that the newspapers are not in business for their health and that they must pay for the news they get like any other advertiser. The newspapers have confirmed the government in this attitude.
Le Temps is always spoken of as “semi-official.” That means that the first column on the front page is written in the foreign office at the Quai d’Orsay, the rest of the columns are at the disposal of the various governments of Europe. A sliding scale of rates handles them. Unimportant governments can get space cheap. Big governments come high. All European governments have a special fund for newspaper publicity that does not have to be accounted for.
This sometimes leads to amusing incidents as a year ago, when the facts were published showing how Le Temps was receiving subsidies for running propaganda for two different Balkan governments who were at loggerheads and printing the dispatches as their own special correspondence on alternate days. No matter how idealistic European politics may be, a trusting idealist is about as safe in its machinery as a blind man stumbling about in a sawmill. One of my best friends was in charge of getting British propaganda printed in the Paris press at the close of the war. He is as sincere and idealistic a man as one could know—but he certainly knows where the buzz saws are located and how the furnace is stoked.
In spite of the fact that the great Paris dailies, which are so widely quoted in the States and Canada as organs of public opinion, say that the people of France are solidly backing the occupation of the Ruhr, it is nevertheless true. France always backs the government in anything it does against a foreign foe once the government has started. It is that really wonderful patriotism of the French. All Frenchmen are patriotic—and nearly all Frenchmen are politicians. But the absolute backing of the government only lasts a certain length of time. Then after the white heat has cooled, the Frenchman looks the situation over, the facts begin to circulate around, he discovers that the occupation is not a success—and overthrows the government. The Frenchman feels he must be absolutely loyal to his government but he can overthrow it and get a new government to be loyal to at any time.
Marshal Foch, for example, was opposed to the Ruhr occupation. He washed his hands of it absolutely. But once it was launched, he did not come out against it. He sent General [Maxime] Weygand, his chief of staff, to oversee it and do the best he could. But he does not want to be associated with it in any way.
Similarly Loucheur, the former minister of the liberated regions, and one of the ablest men in France, opposed the occupation. Loucheur is a man who does not mince words. During the period when France was pouring out money for reconstruction with seemingly no regard as to how it was spent or for what, Loucheur did all he could to control it. It was Loucheur who told the mayor of Rheims: “Monsieur, you are asking exactly six times the cost of this reconstruction.”
A few days ago M. Loucheur said to me in conversation, “I was always opposed to the occupation. It is impossible to get any money that way. But now that they have gone in, now that the flag of France is unfurled, we are all Frenchmen and we must loyally support the occupation.”
M. André Tardieu, who headed the French mission to the United States during the war and is Clemenceau’s lieutenant, opposed the advance into the Ruhr in his paper, the Echo National, up until the day it started. Now he is denouncing it as ill-run, badly managed, wishy-washy and not strong enough. M. Tardieu, who looks like a bookmaker, foresees the failure of the present government with the failure of the occupation but he wants to be in a position to catch the reaction in the bud and say: “Give us a chance at it. Let us show that, properly handled, it can be a success.” For M. Tardieu is a very astute politician and that is very nearly his only chance of getting back into power for some time.
Edouard Herriot, mayor of Lyons, a member of the cabinet during the war, and dark-horse candidate for next premier of F
rance, after supporting the occupation in the same way that Loucheur is doing, has now sponsored a resolution in the Lyons city council protesting the occupation and demanding consideration of a financial and economic entente with Germany. This demand of Herriot may be the first puff of the wind that is bound to rise and blow the Poincaré government out of power.
Now why are these, and many other intelligent Frenchmen, opposed to the occupation although they want to get every cent possible from Germany? It is simply because of the way it is going. It is losing France money instead of making it and from the start it was seen by the long-headed financiers that it would only cripple Germany’s ability to pay further reparations, unite her as a country and reflame her hatred against France—and cost more money than it would ever get out.
Before the occupation a train of twelve or more cars of coal or coke left the Ruhr for France every twenty-eight minutes. Now there are only two trains a day. A train of twelve cars is now split up into four trains to pad the figures and make the occupation look successful.
When there is a shipment of coal to be gotten out, four or five tanks, a battalion of infantry, and fifty workmen go to do the job. The soldiers are to prevent the inhabitants beating up the workmen. The official figures on the amount of coal and coke that has been exported from the Ruhr and the money that has already been given by the Chamber of Deputies for the first months of the occupation show that the coal France was receiving as her reparations account is now costing her a little over $200 a ton. And she isn’t getting the coal.
At the start of the occupation certain correspondents wrote that it would be easy for France to run the Ruhr profitably, all she would have to do would be to bring in cheap labor—Italian or Polish labor is always cheap—and just get the stuff out. The other day I saw some of this cheap labor locked in a car at the Gare du Nord bound for Essen. They were a miserable lot of grimy unfit-looking men, the sort that could not get work in France, or anywhere else. They were all drunk, some shouting, some asleep on the floor of the car, some sick. They looked more like a shanghaied ship’s crew than anything else. And they were all going to be paid double wages and work halftime under military protection. No workmen will go into the Ruhr for less than double wages—and it has been almost impossible to get workmen for that. The Poles and Italians will not touch the job. If you want any further information on the way it works out economically, ask any businessman or any street railway head who has ever had a strike how much money his corporation made during the time it was employing strikebreakers.
Now that we have seen in a quick glance the forces that are at work in France in this war after the war, the situation of France, and the views of her people, we can next look at Germany.
The “Battle” of Offenburg
The Toronto Daily Star
April 25, 1923
OFFENBURG, BADEN.—Offenburg is the southern limit of the French occupation of Germany. It is a clean, neat little town with the hills of the Black Forest rising on one side and the Rhine plain stretching off on the other.
The French seized Offenburg in order to keep the great international railway line open. The line runs straight north from Basel in Switzerland through
Freiburg,
Offenburg,
Karlsruhe,
Cologne,
Düsseldorf
to Holland. It was the main artery of communication and commerce in Germany.
According to the French their occupation was to insure the safe passage of coal trains on the main line between the Ruhr and Italy. They feared the Germans might shunt the cars off at Offenburg and ship them on a branch line up into the Black Forest, and eventually back into the industrial district of what the French papers refer to as “unoccupied Germany.”
Germany denounced the occupation of Offenburg, located in the Duchy of Baden in the far south of Germany, some hundreds of miles from the Ruhr, as a breach of the Treaty of Versailles. The French replied by expelling the burgomaster and some two hundred citizens who had signed the protest from the town. The Germans then informed the French that no more trains would run through Offenburg on the great main Rhineland railway.
For almost two months now not a train has run through Offenburg. I stood on the bridge over the right-of-way and looked at the four wide-gauge tracks stretching to Switzerland in one direction and Holland in the other, red with rust. Trains stop three miles each way from Offenburg, north and south. Passengers get out with their baggage, and if they are Germans, can ride into Offenburg in a motorbus and get another bus to take them the three miles the other side of the town where they can continue their journey. If they are French, they are allowed to walk, carrying their baggage.
No coal has gone through since the town was seized. Now the French face the problem—if they want to control the Rhine railway—of occupying every town along the whole length of it at an expenditure of at least four hundred thousand men, and then running the trains themselves. Otherwise the Germans say they will run trains to just outside the limit of the French occupation, and then stop them. It is their answer to the strategists who put their fingers on the map and said, “It is very simple. We will take this town here and that will control this country. It will take only a few men, etc.”
The Franco-German commercial war has settled down to a question of which government goes absolutely broke first. All the Germans I have talked to say, “We could not do anything without our government. The government pays all the people who lose their jobs through the occupation. It pays all those who are expelled from the town. It pays the unemployed.”
The German government is now using up the gold to stabilize the mark that it normally paid over to the reparations commission. It is using these marks that it buys at the fixed rate of 20,800 marks to the dollar to fight the occupation. It is also already using a good portion of its hoarded gold. When through the crippling of German industries and the exhaustion of the gold supply the German government is no longer able to fight the occupation by putting the government resources back of the individuals who suffer by the occupation, and making good their losses with government money, the French will have won the struggle of attrition. But Germany’s gold will have been used up before she quits, her industries ruined, and she will be as profitable to the French as a squeezed lemon.
On the day before I left Paris M. Poincaré asked the Chamber of Deputies for 192,000,000 francs for the expenses of the first four months’ occupation of the Ruhr. Four months more of that, and if the German government goes under, the French government will have won a commercial victory at the cost of biting off its own nose to spite Germany’s face.
From Offenburg to Ortenberg, where there was a train, I rode in a motortruck. The driver was a short, blond German with sunken cheeks and faded blue eyes. He had been badly gassed at the Somme. We were riding along a white dusty road through green fields forested with hop poles, their tangled wires flopping. We crossed a wide, swift, clearly pebbled stream with a flock of geese resting on a gravel island. A manure spreader was busily clicking in the field. In the distance were the blue Schwarzwald hills.
“My brother,” said the driver, guiding the big wheel with one arm half wrapped around it, “he had hard luck.”
“So?”
“Ja. He never had no luck, my brother.”
“What was he doing?”
“He was signalman on the railway from Kehl. The French put him out. All the signalmen. The day they came to Offenburg, they gave them all twenty-four hours.”
“But the government pays him, doesn’t it?”
“Oh yes. They pay him. But he can’t live on it.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Well, he’s got seven kids.”
I pondered this. The driver went on in his drawling south German. “They pay him what he got, but the prices are up and where he was signalman he had a little garden. A nice garden. It makes a difference when you got a garden.”
“What’s he do now?” I asked.
We passed another lovely clear stream that curved alongside the road. It had clear, gravel-bottomed ripples, and then deep holes along the bank.
“Trout?” I asked.
“Not anymore,” the driver laughed. “When we had the revolution, nobody knew what to do. It was in the papers and it was posted up. They sang in the streets and said ‘Down with the kaiser’ and ‘Hoch the republic,’ and there was nothing more to do. But they had to do something, so because it was always trouble to get fischkarten [fishing licenses], they went out to the stream with hand grenades and killed the trout and everybody had trout to eat. Then the police came and put some in jail and the revolution was over.”
“Herr Canada,” said the driver, “how long do you think the French will stay in Offenburg?”
“Three or four months maybe. Who knows?”
The driver looked ahead up the white road that we were turning to dust behind us. “There will be trouble then. Bad trouble. The working people will make trouble. Already the factories are shutting down all around here.”
“It won’t be like the other revolution?” I asked.
The driver laughed, a hollow-cheeked, skin drum-tight, hollow-eyed laugh. “No, they won’t throw any grenades at the trout then.” The thought amused him very much. He laughed again.
The Belgian Lady and the German Hater
The Toronto Daily Star
April 28, 1923
FRANKFURT-ON-MAIN.—On the frontier between Baden and Württemberg I found my first Hater. It was all the fault of the Belgian lady who would insist on speaking French. In the roaring dark of going through a tunnel the Belgian lady had shouted something at me. I didn’t understand and she repeated, this time in French: “Please close the door.”
Dateline- Toronto Page 30