André Tardieu has announced an attack on the Ruhr policy as it has been carried out. Things are beginning to boil.
The end of the Ruhr venture looks very near. It has weakened Germany, and so has pleased M. Daudet and M. Poincaré. It has stirred up new hates and revived old hates. It has caused many people to suffer. But has it strengthened France?
French Speed with Movies on the Job
The Toronto Daily Star
May 16, 1923
DÜSSELDORF .—Hiking along the road that runs through the dreary brick outskirts of Düsseldorf out into the pleasant open country that rolls in green swells patched with timber between the smoky towns of the Ruhr, you pass slow-moving French ammunition carts, the horses led by short, blue-uniformed, quiet-faced Chinamen, their tin hats on the back of their heads, their carbines slung over their head. French cavalry patrols ride by. Two broad-faced Westphalian iron puddlers who are sitting under a tree and drawing their unemployment pay, watch the cavalry out of sight around a bend in the road.
I borrowed a match from one of the iron puddlers. They are Westphalians, hardheaded, hard-muscled, uncivil and friendly. They want to go snipe-shooting. The snipe have just come with the spring, but they haven’t any shotguns. They laugh at the little Indo-Chinamen with their ridiculous big blue helmets on the back of their heads and they applaud one little Annamite who has gotten way behind the column and is trotting along to catch up, holding his horse’s bridle with sweat running down his face, his helmet joggling down over his eyes. The little Annamite smiles happily.
Then at forty miles an hour in a sucking swirl of dust a French staff car goes by. Beside the hunched-down driver is a French officer. In the rear I get a glimpse of two civilians holding their hats on in the wind and another French officer. It is one of the personally conducted tours of the Ruhr. The two civilians are American ministers who have come to “investigate” the Ruhr occupation. The French are showing them around.
Personally conducted tours are a great feature of the Ruhr. The two gentlemen in the car are typical of the way it is done. They obtained a letter of introduction to General Degoutte from Paris. They wanted to make a full and impartial investigation of the Ruhr occupation in order that they might return to America and give their churches the facts. It is true they hadn’t thought of this when they came to Europe, but the Ruhr was the big headline news and to be an authority on Europe when you returned to America you must have seen the Ruhr. If the Genoa Conference had been on they would have gone to Genoa and so on.
They are at Düsseldorf speaking a very little French and no German. The French were delightful to them. A staff car and two officers were placed at their disposal and they were told they could go anywhere they wanted. They didn’t know much where they wanted to go so the French took them. At forty miles an hour they did the Ruhr in an afternoon. They saw towering mountains of coke, they saw great factories, they ascended the water tower and looked out over the valley.
“There,” pointed a French officer, “are the steel works of Stinnes, there are those of Thyssen. Beyond you see the works of Krupp.”
That night one of them said to me: “We’ve seen it all and I want to tell you right now that France is absolutely in the right. I tell you I never saw anything like it in my life before. I never saw such mines and factories in all my life. France did absolutely and un-ee-quivocally right to seize them. And let me tell you this thing is running like clockwork.”
Next in point of amusement to the personally conducted tours in the Ruhr are the rival French and German press bureaus at the Hotel Kaiserhof in Essen. The French press officer is a large blond man who looks like the living picture of the conventional caricature of the German. On the other hand the German press officer who arrived at the Kaiserhof to give his thirty minutes of propaganda immediately after the French press officer had functioned, looked exactly like the caricatured Frenchman. Small, dark, concentrated-looking. Both sides freely distorted facts and furnished false news.
Sir Percival Phillips, of the Daily Mail, after he had been badly let down by a piece of French news he used which proved false the next day, said he would use no more of either press bureau’s news without labeling it as from the press bureau. “My paper is pro-French,” he said, “but it might not always be my paper, and I have a reputation as a journalist to sustain.”
The French have a genius for love, war, making wine, farming, painting, writing and cooking. None of these accomplishments is particularly applicable to the Ruhr, except making war. The military end of the occupation has been carried out admirably. But to run this industrial heart of Germany, which has been pinched out and cut off by the military, requires business genius. Business genius is required to run it at all.
At the customs cordon which was designed to separate occupied from unoccupied Germany and yield tremendous revenue on taxes and duties, you see this spectacle: A long column of trucks on the occupied side of the imaginary line chained together, piled high with packages and goods, covered with tarpaulins, some of which had blown off. They have been standing there for weeks. The five douaniers or customs men have been too busy intercepting all goods to have time to search those they have held up. At the railroad siding there is a huge warehouse jammed to the rafters with held-up merchandise.
A fat movie operator comes up in a motorcar, taking propaganda pictures to show the people of France how well the occupation is going. He gets out of the car, sets up his camera and shouts instructions to the douaniers who have been sitting against the side of the shed smoking their pipes. They stir into action. The movie man shoots a long line of trucks, then the five douaniers each climb up the side of a truck and begin to pull packages out, rip them open, haul out the contents, put a chalk mark on the package and jam it back into the truck.
When he has enough footage the operator makes a note in his book, “Our Douaniers At Work In The Ruhr,” shoves the book into his pocket, gets into the car, waves adieu to the long-suffering douaniers, who relapse back with their pipes against the wall of the shed.
I watched movies taken of coal being loaded. The same fat operator. An enormous pile of coal. Six workmen tore into the pile of coal. “Get a move on,” said the operator. “Show some action. You’re not on strike. You’re working.” They worked at top speed.
“C’est fini,” said the operator, stopping cranking.
The workmen straightened up. The movie man moved off. One workman looked up at the enormous mountain of coal.
“He’s a pig. That’s what he is, that cinema thing.” His pal agreed.
Reaching down the first workman pulled out of his musette a bottle of good red French wine. They had a long drink.
The movie man was writing in his notebook, “Our Workers Loading Coal In The Ruhr.”
King Business in Europe
The Toronto Star Weekly
September 15, 1923
The other day in Paris I ran into my old pal Shorty. Shorty is a film service movie operator. He takes the news films you see at the movies. Shorty was just back from Greece.
“Say,” said Shorty, “that George is a fine kid.”
“What George?” I asked.
“Why, the king,” said Shorty. “Didn’t you meet him? You know who I mean. The new one.”
“I never met him,” I said.
“Oh, he’s a white man,” Shorty said, signaling the waiter. “He’s a prince, this boy. Look at this.”
I looked at it. It was a sheet of notepaper embossed with the royal arms of Greece, and written in English.
The King would be very pleased if Mr. Wornall would call either in the morning or in the afternoon. He will be expected all day. If he will be so good as to answer by the bearer, a carriage will be sent to bring him to the royal palace.
—(Signed) George.
“Oh, he’s a wonderful kid,” said Shorty, folding the letter carefully and putting it back into his wallet.
“Why, you know I went out there in the afternoon with my ca
mera. We drove into the palace grounds past a lot of these big tall babies in ballet skirts with their rifles held at the salute. I got out and he came walking down the drive and shook hands and said: ‘Hello. How have you been, Mr. Wornall?’
“We went for a walk around the grounds and there was the queen clipping a rosebush. ‘This is the queen,’ said George. ‘How do you do?’ she said.”
“How long did you stay?” I asked.
“Oh, a couple of hours,” Shorty said. “The king was glad to have somebody to talk to. We had whiskey and soda at a table under a big tree. The king said it was no fun being shut up there. They hadn’t given him any money since the revolution, and wouldn’t let any of the Greek aristocracy visit him. They wouldn’t let him go outside the grounds.
“‘It’s frightfully dull, you know,’ he said. ‘[Prince] Andrew was the lucky one. They banished him, you know, and now he can live in London or Paris or wherever he wants.’”
“What language do you talk with him?” I said.
“English, of course,” Shorty answered. “That’s what all the Greek royal family speak. Mrs. W. B. Leeds, you know. I ran off a lot of film of him and the queen all around the palace and out in the field. He wanted me to take him with an old binder they had out in one of the big fields inside the walls. ‘This will look fine in America, won’t it?’ he said.”
“What’s the queen like?” I said.
“Oh, I didn’t get to know her very well,” Shorty answered. “I only stayed a couple of hours. I never like to stick around with them too long. Some Americans just about abuse them. They get an invitation out to the palace and then the king can’t get rid of them. But the queen’s nice, all right. When I left the king said: ‘Well, maybe we’ll meet in the States sometime.’ Like all the Greeks, he wants to get over to the States.”
George of Greece is the newest king in Europe, and probably the most uncomfortable. As Shorty says, he is a very nice boy, and he isn’t having any fun at all. He was put into the job by a revolutionary committee last fall, and he stays in just as long as they let him.
George is married to a Rumanian princess, daughter of Queen Marie and King Ferdinand of Rumania, and just now his mother-in-law is making a tour of the capitals of Europe to get George recognized—and, incidentally, her daughter recognized as queen.
Which brings us to Rumania, where the king business isn’t flourishing so well either.
King Ferdinand looks as worried as any man who hides his true expression behind a crop of choice Upper Danube whiskers can look. Rumania is the one country that no one in Europe takes seriously. When the statesmen and their friends were living in the best hotels of Paris during the year 1919 and making the treaty that was designed to Europeanize the Balkans, and succeeded in Balkanizing Europe, the Rumanians had a choice collection of rapid talkers and historical-precedent-quoters manned for action.
When these talkers had finished and the treaties were signed it developed that Rumania had been given all the land of her neighbors in any direction that any Rumanian had mentioned. The treaty-makers probably considered this a cheap price to pay to free themselves from the presence of the ardent Rumanian patriots. At any rate, Rumania now has to maintain one of the largest standing armies in Europe to keep down revolts of her new Rumanians whose one desire is to cease to be Rumanians.
Sooner or later large chunks of Rumania are going to break off and drift away like an ice floe when it hits the Gulf Stream. Queen Marie, who is a first-class bridge player, a second-rate poetess, a very high-grade puller of European political strings, and who uses more makeup than all the rest of the European royal families combined, is making every effort to form such European alliances that this coming disintegration will be stopped. On the other side, Prince Carol, who is a most charming, oh, most charming young man and president of the Prince Carol Film Company, which had the exclusive filming of the especially staged Rumanian coronation, does not appear to be gravely interested.
Meanwhile the officers of the Rumanian army, which will bear the brunt of Hungarian and Russian attacks sometime within the next ten years, use lipstick, rouge their faces, and wear corsets. This is no exaggeration. I have, with my own eyes, seen Rumanian officers, infantry officers, using lipsticks in a café. I have seen cavalry officers rouged like chorus men. I would not swear to the corsets. Appearances may be deceptive.
Working back from Rumania, we enter the realm of King Boris of Bulgaria. Boris is the son of Ferdinand the Fox. When the Near Eastern front crumbled in 1918, and the Bulgarian troops came home with revolutionary committees at their heads, they released a large, rough, foulmouthed ex-farmer named Stambouliski from the jail where he had been ever since he had tried to get Bulgaria into the war on the side of the Allies. Stambouliski came out of jail like a bull coming out from his dark pen into the bright glare of the bullring. His first charge was toward King Ferdinand. Ferdinand left the country. Boris, his son, wished to go, too. “If you attempt to leave the country I’ll have you shot,” Stambouliski roared.
Boris stayed. Stambouliski used to keep him in an anteroom and call him in when he wanted an interpreter to talk to people he wished to be especially polite to. Newspaper correspondents, for example.
Boris is blond, pleasant and talkative. He heartily dislikes Bulgaria and wants to live in Paris. Now Stambouliski has been overthrown by the old pro-German army officers, grafters, intriguing politicians and Balkan intellectuals, which means in Bulgaria people who have absorbed sufficient learning as to be no longer honest, and killed like an escaping convict by the people who ruined the country he has been trying to save. Boris is still the king, but he is now controlled by the will of his father Ferdinand and the old fox’s advisers.
I have not seen him for over a year, but they say he is still as blond, but not as pleasant nor talkative. He is not married, but Queen Marie, the matchmaker, is grooming a daughter.
Next in line is Alexander of Yugoslavia, or as the Yugoslavs insist it is, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Alexander is the son of King Peter of Serbia. He is no relation to the Croats and Slovenes. I saw him one night in a Montmartre resort in Paris, where he had come incognito for a last visit to the capital before his marriage. There were a number of Serbs and several Frenchmen with him, all in evening dress. Various girls were at the table. It was a big night for the wine growers. Alexander was quite drunk and very happy.
Shortly after this trip the marriage was postponed, but eventually took place.
Victor Emmanuel of Italy is a very short, serious little man with a gray, goatlike beard and tiny hands and feet. His legs looked as thin but as sturdy as a jockey’s when he used to wear roll puttees with his uniform. His queen is almost a head taller than himself. The Italian king’s lack of stature is a characteristic of the ancient House of Savoy, the greatest of whose long heritage of rulers have been little taller than bantamweight boxers.
Just at present the king of Italy is probably the most popular king in Europe. He has handed over his kingdom, his army and his navy to Mussolini. Mussolini handed them politely back with many protestations of loyalty to the House of Savoy. Then he decided to keep the army and navy himself. When he will ask for the kingdom no one knows.
I have talked to many Fascisti, the old original nucleus of the party, who have all sworn that they are Republicans. “But we trust Mussolini,” they said. “Mussolini will know when the time is ripe.”
There is a chance, of course, that Mussolini will renounce hisold republicanism just as Garibaldi did. He has done so temporarily, and he has a genius for making something that he is doing temporarily appear to be permanent.
But the Fascisti party to exist must have action. It is getting a little satisfaction now out of Corfu and the Adriatic. If it needed a republic to hold it together, it would get a republic.
As a man and a human being there is probably no finer father or more democratic ruler on the continent than Victor Emmanuel.
The King of Spain has been
king ever since he can remember. He was born king, and you can trace the evolution of his familiarly photographed under-jaw on the five-peseta pieces since 1886. It’s no treat for him to be king. He’s never been anything else. He was much handsomer as a baby, if the peseta pieces are accurate, but then we all were.
Alfonso is another king whose throne rests on a volcano. But it doesn’t seem to worry him much. He is an excellent polo player and the best amateur motorcar driver in Spain.
Recently the king drove his car from Santander, a summer watering place in the north of Spain, to Madrid, over mountains, hills, and along precipices at an average speed of sixty miles an hour. There was a good deal of criticism in many of the Spanish papers. “If we have responsibilities to a king does not a king have responsibilities to us to keep himself intact, etc.” The trip was not well received. But two weeks later the king opened the new motor racing track at San Sebastian by turning off two laps himself at well over one hundred kilometers an hour. His time was only four kilometers an hour behind the winner of the Grand Prix.
The day of the Grand Prix at San Sebastian there was another Spanish military disaster in Morocco in which the Spanish lost over 500 killed, there was a revolt in the barracks at Málaga, and two regiments of troops mutinied, refusing to leave Spain for the Moorish front. The desultory guerrilla warfare that has been going on in Barcelona between the labor men and the government, and which has resulted in over two hundred assassinations in less than a year, continues. But there are no attempts on the life of the king. The people don’t take Alfonso too seriously. They have had him for a long time.
In the north live the respectable kings—Haakon of Norway, Gustaf of Sweden and Christian of Denmark. They are so well situated that no one ever hears much about them. Except the king of Sweden, who is an ardent and very good tennis player and plays regularly with Suzanne Lenglen as his partner every winter at Cannes.
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