The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  And all the way, forever and ever, the two-story brick houses, growing straight out of the earth, each one like the last and all attached together. Fairly solid, fairly comfortable, quite cheap to rent, and horribly ugly. And the smokestacks against the sky, and the grimy town, and the pale factory people.

  At Stockton, in the square, hemmed in by Penny's Bank and Barclay's and the National Provincial Bank, the Communist party was having a meeting. The speaker was hoarse and the crowd apathetic and it looked like rain. The dingy City lay in flat brick streets out from the square. “The English flag does not protect English sailors,” the speaker shouted, but no one seemed to care. A young man in tweeds, selling Communist pamphlets, started a conversation. It sounded like a bad mystery thriller and was as depressing as the scenery: “Germany could drop an army onto English soil from these new bombers, and if we were attacked we'd fight like the Spanish people. If we're going to be aggressors and sent over to fight Germany, then we'd join up and spread sedition in the ranks. The Communist party doesn't want war with anybody, even Germany.”

  At Newcastle, a man who looked charmingly like Santa Claus, the president of a union of a million and a half shipwrights, told me: “We go to the government and say: ‘You ask us to make these armaments, but what for? Who's the enemy? What's the danger?’ All they'll say is: ‘We want two years’ production in one. We don't know anything.’ “ With a great weariness he said: “I address mass meetings and tell the workers that the peace of the world depends on our foreign policy and they begin to read the racing news.”

  For three miles the Vickers-Armstrong plant stretches sootily along the Newcastle road. In a pub across from the factory gate, some workers were having a noonday beer. I asked an old woman with a frizzled permanent, who was drinking with them, if she had a gas mask. She roared with laughter and said she'd lived right here opposite the factory for twenty years and never had a gas mask and the only time she'd been gassed was on beer. The young cop on point duty outside remarked that he didn't mind whether there was a war or not; it'd be a bit of a change. He didn't think, however, that he'd see France; he thought they'd be going direct to Germany. . . . And opposite the Vickers plant is a school, and all around are the homes of the workers, and everyone knows (or so you'd have thought) that munitions factories are targets for bombers—and there is Newcastle on the coast near the North Sea, but who was worrying?

  The A.R.P. headquarters of Newcastle are in a fashionable neighborhood, and formerly this was the house of a noble lord. Now the basement is full of gas masks, and trenches are being dug in the garden, and in the back courtyard is a little doll's house affair where you can practice being gassed, with your gas mask on. “Nobody will start a war,” said the Air Raid Warden, confidently, “because we shall be too strong.”

  The shipyards are doing a huge business. The steel-gray director of one of the great firms received us, and was very surprised when asked whether he thought he was building these destroyers, cruisers, battleships for use or for looks. He hadn't bothered about it; that was the politicians’ job. “If a war started, we'd all march,” he said. “But it's not my business to think about it.”

  In Sheffield, having been politely but firmly removed from an arms factory, I went to visit the A.R.P. office. I heard such titbits as that builders were digging bombproof cellars into gardens, to attract buyers to new houses, and that a large block of flats that catered to the clerk-employee class had a bombproof cellar but no one had asked to see it. “People see how easy it is to protect themselves,” the A.R.P. official said, removing his pince-nez (after some more talk about cellophane), “so they aren't afraid.”

  “They'd better be,” I said. “Sheffield is twelve minutes by air from the coast. And it's the biggest arms center in England, isn't it, and what do you suppose bombers are after?”

  “The government must know what it's doing,” he said, with dignity.

  I remembered all the others in buses and bars and drawing rooms and clubs. I remembered the young man with a famous name, saying: “Of course we run England but we do it very well. There isn't a war yet, is there? And if there is one, we'll win it.” The truck driver had also said: “This country can't be beat.” Everyone who hadn't said it thought it. I. remembered the cook, rather startling in a large black straw hat, coming to get the day's orders, and her comments on the world: “I'm sure Sir Samuel Hoare—that's the Prime Minister, isn't it, Modom?—is doing his very best for us.” It didn't matter that Sir Samuel wasn't Prime Minister; after all, millions of her fellow countrymen shared her view. I thought of the lady M.P. remarking over coffee: “All this A.R.P. talk is horrid, it just makes people war-mad. No one's going to bomb London. Nonsense. Why should they?” It rose from England like mist; it was as real as the London fog: everything's going to be all right—somehow. And at last I thought, well, they certainly believe it, so maybe it's true: the Lord will provide for England.

  Obituary of a Democracy

  COLLIER’S, December 1938

  On all the roads in Czechoslovakia, the army was going home. You would see them walking in small groups or alone, not walking fast and not walking well, but just going back from the frontiers as they had been told to do. Once in a while you would see a company, with its officer leading, marching along; but not the way an army marches to war. People would stand at the side of the road and watch them in silence. No one spoke and no one cheered, and the soldiers’ faces were like the faces of the civilians, sad and bewildered and somehow hurt or ashamed. Sometimes soldiers would come by, with faded flowers in their caps, standing up in the commandeered trucks. But they were not singing, they were not calling to the girls. And then you would pass the artillery, the short-nosed, khaki-colored, clean, strong guns, twelve of them, twenty of them, hauled by quick small cars; and the people watched the guns go by, in silence and despair.

  At night, the headlights of your car would pick out a line of horses, three abreast, led by a cavalryman, forty horses, sixty horses, more than you could count, sleek and well-fed, being led back to the farmers who had given them to the army. In every village you could see the khaki-covered wagons, drawn up in a semicircle in the village square, and the soliders, like gypsies, camped around their carts, waiting to move to the next place, farther from the frontier—home.

  The rain-dark sky gleamed over the woods and in every hollow there was a little lake. Peasants worked in the fields, kneeling to cut the sugar beets. The pale, cement-colored villages lay in the ripples of the green land. And there on the road were the soliders, like waifs, like hoboes, begging a lift.

  A man waved to us and we stopped. He ran, banging his small suitcase against his legs. He was a corporal and wore thick glasses.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “I'm going home,” he said without gladness. “It is two villages farther down the road.”

  He began to talk, all by himself, as if he had to say it to somebody whether he was understood or not. “You realize we were all alone,” he said. “England and France will see for themselves when it is Alsace-Lorraine he wants, or the colonies. Even the Poles will see when he wants the Corridor. And now we are going to be very poor. It will be hard for us to live and it will be hard for the Sudetens to live. But what could we do, as we were alone?”

  “Your family will be waiting,” I said to cheer him up.

  “I have one son,” he said. “I am sorry for him.”

  They stopped you all along the road, everywhere. Trains weren't running: railroad lines that once led to their homes now ran through Germany; busses had been conscripted for the army. They walked very wearily and without haste, and they raised their arms, asking for a lift, but they did not seem to care whether you took them along or not.

  The army scarcely knew where it was going. Men would ask you on the road if you knew whether such a village was German now, or Czech. Or had Poland taken it, or had it fallen to Hungary? The did not know where their families were. “I live in Teplitz,” a middle-ag
ed man said, and he held his trench cap tight in his hands, frightened and worried. “But my wife will have gone with the children. She would not be safe there. But where would she be? Do you know where the people are from Teplitz?”

  Those who lived in the part of Czechoslovakia that still remained did not know what work there would be, because so much had been lost: mines and factories and railroads and fields. So where would a man work now? In a café near Tabor some soldiers were talking over the newspapers.

  “There are going to be labor camps for the unemployed,” one of them said.

  “There are no unemployed in Czechoslovakia,” another said.

  “Yes, there are,” the first one said, leaning close to the paper and reading the small, smeared print. “It says that in the month of July and August there were 160,000 unemployed in the whole state, but now of course there will be a great many, since the Germans have taken so much, and as we are poor we must now have labor camps.”

  “Like Germany,” a third soldier said bitterly. “Labor camps for the Czechs. As if we were Germans.” He spoke slowly in an angry, ashamed voice. Being a soldier was one thing—a soldier was a free man who fought gladly for his state. But to be herded into camps to work, when you had always worked proudly and freely, coming back at night to your home, your own things, your wife and your garden—that was another matter.

  “We cannot help it,” the first one said. “We cannot do what we like now.”

  So there they were, everywhere, the army that never had a chance to fight. They had given up their fortifications that they would have held against aviation, artillery and infantry until they were dead. Their frontier had been pushed back, behind the mountains and the forests that they could have defended, and now the frontier was a mad zigzag across open indefensible country. All that remained to them was the third line of defense in the north, a neat double row of steel spools with barbed-wire twisted on them, a neat black row like cross-stitching cutting across the open fields, with here and there a camouflaged pillbox, looking like a haystack, with antitank guns in it. But the Czech army never thought it would be driven back to the third line; the army was proud and it was good.

  It cost four million dollars a day to mobilize the army, and now it was going home. It cost four hundred milliion dollars to build the great Czech Maginot Line, a copy of the French defenses constructed under French orders and on French plans, and now that was lost, and its secret, the secret of the French Maginot Line, belonged to the Germans. (But a Czech officer told me that when the Germans came to take over the fortifications he walked through them with a German officer, and the German looked at these defenses with awe, and said, “We would have lost hundreds of thousands of men getting through here, and maybe we couldn't have done it.”) In two years it cost the people of Czechoslovakia seven hundred and fifty million dollars to arm themselves; in six weeks, just before the peace, they gave in voluntary contribution twenty million dollars to the National Defense Fund. They had never counted the cost because they were the outpost of France in Central Europe, they were a democracy, and they were prepared to fight with their allies for what they believed. But now all this meant nothing, the country was helpless, and the army was going home.

  On September 23d at 4:30 P.M. there was a telephone call from London to the Czech Foreign Office, stating that England and France agreed they could no longer take the responsibility of counseling the Czechs not to mobilize. At 6 P.M. the same message came by telephone from Paris. At 9 P.M., therefore, on these instructions, the Czech government ordered mobilization for war. Eight hundred thousand men answered the call. Waiters in restaurants put down their trays and ran to their homes to get their equipment. Telegraph operators, taxi drivers, streetcar conductors, theater ushers, newspaper venders—all the people who worked at night left their jobs.

  People raced through the streets. The mobilization was supposed to take six hours, and it took three. There was no singing, no hysterics, no war fever. But the Czechs were going to defend the land they had won back after three hundred years; they were going to fight for the democracy that they had spent twenty years patiently building. They were a fine army and they knew it; they were trained and disciplined and brave and they knew what they were fighting for. No women wept; no women held their men back; no women were afraid; though they knew that cities were like trenches: in war nowadays there is no safety anywhere, there is no rear guard. So the Czechs moved off in trucks and trains and private cars, and even on bicycles, to join their regiments.

  And when they came back it wasn't like a retreat—because a retreat is fierce and alive, and all during a retreat you know that somewhere the army will stand and hold. But there was nothing to hold now: the land had been given away without asking them. They had never fired a shot; they were not allowed to die for their country. They were sent home. It was defeat without battle.

  The soldiers weren't the only people walking without purpose, but always inland, away from the frontier. They weren't the only people waiting hopelessly in villages, not knowing where to go or what to do. In the north you got a feeling that the whole country was moving, lost, fleeing. On the road you passed a peasant's cart with a blue enamel pail hanging from it, with a funeral wreath of dead flowers sitting up on top of the mattresses. Four people walked beside it—an old man and an old woman and a younger couple. The women were eating dry bread: they had two slices apiece in their pocketbooks. They did not speak to each other and they walked with great weariness. They had been walking since before dawn and now it was late afternoon; they wanted to go as far from the frontier as they could before they stopped.

  They were Czechs; poor people, not what you would call dangerous people; but the new Germany proved unhealthy for all Czechs and they were getting out. Many of their friends had been threatened or had already disappeared. They did not understand what had happened to their country; but their home was lost, their fields lay behind them, work and safety were gone. . . . You could always tell the refugees by the way they walked, though most of them were empty-handed; they had left home too fast and in too great fear. You could tell the refugees by their shoulders, by how they held their heads and by the weariness.

  Louny is a town near the new frontier: a stiff little stone city with some factories, some shops, schools. The peasants came here from the rich Bohemian plain to buy and sell; it had a quiet, orderly life before all this. There were 11,000 people here in normal times and there have been 7,000 refugees shuttled back and forth in the last days. In the Sokol house, where the Czechs used to practice gymnastics, the refugees sleep. In a room are the bicycles that some of them rode in on; freshly washed stockings and underclothes dry from the upturned legs of desks and tables; straw is piled in the corners to sleep on, some people have mattresses. There are as many as sixty people in a room. They all had homes before; they were people who built their homes solidly to last forever because they believed in them.

  Just to look at their faces is enough, but they will talk if you wait. A man of forty is sitting on a table holding his little yellow-haired daughter in his arms. He has a dark face that has grown bitter in this room. He was a mechanic, a German Sudeten.

  “Everything is left behind,” he says, “my tools, the shop, everything.” The child seems still frightened and he holds her gently; it is a strange thing for children to be waked in the night and hurried over the dark roads in silence.

  “We were democrats,” the man says. “Look, I have always lived here; I am a Czech citizen. But I cannot speak Czech and neither can the child; she went to the German school, I did my work always in German, my wife speaks German. I do not think you can say we were very oppressed.”

  A man in a cap crossed the room and asked if I knew whether they would be allowed to emigrate to Canada. They say the names of these distant places hopefully, not sure what the country is like or where it is, but maybe there will be safety for them there. Canada, they know, is a safe country for people who believe in democracy.


  They have gathered around in a crowd, and a thin, sick-looking man elbows his way into the center; there are tears on his face. But by now you are used to this, you have seen so many people—men and women—weeping as they talk, not like people who pity themselves, but with helplessness and anger.

  “What good does it do if we can go to Canada?” he shouts. “I have lost my wife: I cannot find my wife and the two children. What are they going to do then—send us to Canada and not send the women? Are we never to see our families again?”

  “Where is your wife?” I said.

  “I don't know,” he said; “in Germany. When we first crossed the frontier coming here, they shipped us all back. Back to Germany, you understand. I had fought with the Czech gendarmes against the Henleinists1 when they started to terrorize our town. But I was sent back. There were 1,200 of us and when the train got to Chomutov, the Henlein people came and took us all, took us prisoner. I lied and said my home was in Dux, and we got into another train. Then at Dux I escaped. I came back here on foot alone—my wife made me. We saw what the Henleinists were doing to the people who were against them. But I know nothing of my wife. And who will find our families for us?”

  His voice had risen. The Red Cross nurse who was in charge here was standing away from them all with a stricken face. She kept saying, “It is worse than sickness; it is worse than death; the poor people.”