The great prehistoric trade-route from west to east, from the Iberian peninsula to the plains of Russia, followed the line from the Pyrenees to Paris, through the gaps of Poitiers and Tours, which I described in the chapter on France. It then skirted the Ardennes, and from there followed the outskirts of the central European highlands until it reached the northern lowlands now occupied by the United Soviet Republics of Russia. On its course eastward this road was of course obliged to cross a great many rivers, and it did this wherever it could find a convenient shallow place. Just as the city of Rome grew out of a ford across the Tiber, so a number of the earliest cities of northern Germany were but the continuation of prehistoric and early historic settlements which were situated on the exact spot where to-day we would find a petrol pump and a general store. Hanover and Berlin and Magdeburg and Breslau had all of them got their start that way. Leipzig, although originally it was a village in the heart of Slavic lands, was also of commercial origin, for it was there that the mineral products from the Saxon mountains, such as silver and lead and copper and iron, were assembled before they were sent down the rivers and sold to the merchants patronizing the great European highways from east to west.
GERMANY
Of course, once this road reached the Rhine, water traffic began to compete seriously with the caravans used for the long overland haul. Water traffic has always been much cheaper and much more convenient than land traffic, and long before Caesar caught his first glimpse of the Rhine there must have been rafts used to carry merchandise from Strassburg (where the Rhine connected with the hinterland of Franconia, Bavaria, and Württemberg) to Cologne (I use the modern names) and thence to the marshes of the Low Countries and eventually to Britain.
Berlin, situated on a river where the routes from west to east and from north-west to south-east (from Paris to Petrograd and from Hamburg to Constantinople in modern terms) happened to meet, was bound to become important. But its population remained small until the nineteenth century, when science and industry improved the waterways, and built the railways.
Throughout the Middle Ages Germany consisted of a large number of semi-independent states, but until three hundred years ago there was nothing to indicate that some day this western part of the great European plain would develop into a leading nation of the world. Curiously enough the modern Germany grew almost directly out of the failure of the Crusading Movement. When it became certain that no new territory was to be conquered in western Asia (the Mohammedans had proved more than a match for the Christians) the disinherited classes of Europe began to look for other sources of agricultural wealth. Quite naturally they thought at once of the opportunities offered by the Slavic lands situated just across the Oder and the Vistula, which were inhabited by the wild and heathenish Prussians. One of the old crusading orders, the Teutonic Order, moved, lock, stock, and barrel, from Palestine to east Prussia and transferred its business centre from Acre in Galilea to Marienburg, thirty miles south of Danzig. For two hundred years these knights fought the Slavs and settled the farms of their victims with imported nobles and peasants from the west. In the year 1410 they suffered a terrific defeat at the hands of the Poles in the battle of Tannenberg, the same place where in 1914 Hindenburg annihilated the Russian armies. But somehow or other the order survived even this blow, and when the Reformation occurred they were still a body of considerable importance.
It so happened that at that time the order was ruled by a member of the Hohenzollern family. This particular Grand Master not only joined the Protestant cause but, on the advice of Martin Luther, he declared himself hereditary Duke of Prussia, with Königsberg on the Gulf of Danzig as bis capital. Early in the seventeenth century this duchy was acquired by another branch of the industrious and shrewd Hohenzollern tribe, which ever since the middle of the fifteenth century had been administering the sandy wastes of Brandenburg. A hundred years afterwards (in 1710, to be precise) these Brandenburg upstarts felt themselves strong enough to aspire to something better than the rank of a mere ‘prince elector,’ and they began an agitation to get themselves recognized as kings.
The emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was willing. Dog as a rule does not eat dog, and the Habsburgs were glad to render some small service to their good friends the Hohenzollerns. Weren’t they both members of the same club? In 1871, the seventh Hohenzollern King of Prussia became the first Emperor of a United Germany. Forty-seven years later, the ninth King of Prussia and the third Emperor of modern Germany was forced to leave his throne and his country, and that was the end of a vast holding company which began as a bankrupt remnant of crusading orders and finished as the strongest and most efficient power of the great age of industrialism and capitalism.
But we might as well be honest about it and confess that those ex-Tyrolean mountaineers were an astonishingly capable sort of men, or at least were clever enough to surround themselves with servants of extraordinary ability. For remember that their original territories had possessed no natural wealth of any sort. Prussia had ever been a land of farms and forests and sand and marshes. She did not produce a single article that she could export—the only means whereby she might get a favourable balance of trade.
There was a slight change for the better when a German discovered a way by which sugar could be extracted from beets. But since cane sugar was still infinitely cheaper than beet-sugar, and could be imported by the ship-load from the West Indies, all this meant very little money in the pockets of either Prussians or Brandenburgians. But when the Emperor Napoleon, after having lost his navy in the battle of Trafalgar, decided to destroy England by means of an ‘inverted blockade,’ there arose a sudden but very steady demand for the Prussian beet-sugar. At about the same time, German chemists established the value of potash, and since Prussia had large potash deposits, the country could at last begin to work a little for the foreign market.
The Hohenzollerns, however, were always lucky. After the defeat of Napoleon, Prussia acquired the Rhine region. It was of no particular value until the industrial revolution put a premium upon the possession of coal and iron. Quite unexpectedly Prussia found herself possessed of some of the richest ore and coal fields of the entire world. And then at last the hard school of poverty of the previous five hundred years began to bear fruit. Poverty had already taught the Germans to be thorough and thrifty. It now showed them how to over-manufacture and under-sell all other nations. And when there was no longer room enough on land for the rapidly increasing number of little Teutons, they took to the sea, and within less than half a century they were among the leaders of the countries which derive their revenue from the carrying trade.
Hamburg and Bremen, which, had been of considerable importance, were called back to life, and seriously threatened the claim to exclusive eminence of London and the other British ports. A large ship canal was dug from the Baltic to the North Sea, the so-called Kiel Canal, which was opened in 1895. Canals also connected the Rhine and the Weser and the Oder and the Vistula and the Main and the Danube, providing a direct aquatic route between the North Sea and the Black Sea, and Berlin was given access to the Baltic by means of a canal that ran from the capital to the Oder River and Stettin.
Whatever human ingenuity could do to assure the majority of the people a fairly decent living wage was done, and before the Great War, the average German peasant and working man, while by no means rich, and accustomed to very strict discipline, was probably better housed and better fed and in a general way better protected against accidents and old age than any other group of people belonging to the same class anywhere else.
How all this was sacrificed in the unfortunate outcome of the Great War is a very sad story which, does not belong to this book. But as a result of her defeat Germany lost the rich industrial districts of Alsace and Lorraine that she had taken from the French nearly fifty years previously. She lost all her colonies, her commercial navy, and part of the province of Schleswig-Holstein which she had taken from the Danes after the war of 1864. Several t
housand miles of former Polish territory (but thoroughly Germanized by then) were once again separated from Prussia and returned to Poland, while a broad strip of land, following the course of the Vistula and running from Thorn to Gdynia and the Baltic, was put under Polish suzerainty, that this country might enjoy direct access to the open sea. Part of Silesia, which Frederick the Great had taken from Austria in the eighteenth century, remained in German hands. But the more valuable mineral deposits were given to Poland, although the textile interests stayed under German control.
For the rest, Germany was stripped of everything she had acquired during the previous fifty years, and her colonies in Asia and Africa were divided among other nations which had already more than their share and no surplus population with which to settle them.
Politically speaking, the Treaty of Versailles may have been an excellent document. From the point of view of applied geography, it makes one despair of the future of Europe. I am afraid that those sceptical neutrals who wanted to present Lloyd George and the late Monsieur Clemenceau with a handbook on elementary geography were not so very far wrong.
Chapter XVI
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AUSTRIA, THE COUNTRY THAT WAS AN EMPIRE
The present Republic of Austria has 6,500,000 inhabitants, and 2.000. 000 of these live in the capital city of Vienna. As a result of this extraordinary arrangement the country is top-heavy, and the marvellous old town on the Danube (which river is a muddy grey and not at all as blue as the famous waltz might make you expect) is slowly degenerating into a dead city where disheartened old men and women wander aimlessly among the ruins of their former glory, while members of the younger generation have fled abroad to start a new existence amid happier surroundings, or have committed suicide because life at home was intolerable. Within another hundred years the gay city of Vienna (one of the few cities where the people seemed to be really happy, if often in a sort of childish and careless way), that old, important centre of science and medicine and the arts, will have become a second Venice. From being a capital of an empire containing more than 50,000,000 people it has become a mere village, dependent upon the tourist traffic and what little importance it retains as a port of call for the boats that carry the products of Bohemia and Bavaria to Rumania and to the Black Sea.
At present the geography of the ancient Danube monarchy (this name, by which Austria was formerly known, expressed the true nature of the country about as well as anything could do) is extremely complicated, for it has been hacked to pieces in such an arbitrary fashion as to be almost unrecognizable. But the former dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary was a perfect example of how natural conditions will influence the formation of strong centralized States. Forget all about frontiers for a moment and look at the map of this region, which was situated almost in the very heart of the European continent, as far away from the toe of Italy’s foot as from the nose of the Danish peninsula. It was really an immense circle of flat lands and rolling territory, entirely surrounded by high mountain-ranges. On the west there were the Alps of Switzerland and the Tyrol. In the north were the Erz Mountains and the Riesengebirge (the Giant Mountains) of Bohemia, and the Carpathians, which formed a semicircle sheltering the Hungarian Puszta (or steppe) against invasions from the side of the Slavic plains. The Danube separated the Carpathians and their southern part, the so-called Transylvanian Alps, from the Balkan Mountains, and the Dinaric Alps were the barrier that protected the plains from the winds of the Adriatic Sea.
The people who founded this State had very imperfect maps, and their theoretical knowledge of geography was quite negligible. But just as the pioneers who conquered the Western United States followed certain definite tracks and routes without having consciously studied an outline of the road that carried them to their final destination, so did those medieval conquerors accumulate their vast holdings by merely doing what was ‘immediately practicable’ without bothering themselves about the theoretical side of the problem. Such things took care of themselves. Nature provided them with certain unavoidable ‘consequences’ and Man, whenever he is wise, quietly obeys her commands.
During the first thousand years of our era, the great Hungarian plain was a veritable no-man’s-land, invaded by the tribes who followed the course of the Danube on their way from the Black Sea to the west, and who were without any settled form of government. Charlemagne, during his life-long warfare upon the Slavic people from the east, founded a small ‘mark’ or frontier post, as we would call it, which, being the eastern mark or Oester Reich (the same word as ‘Austria’), gave birth to the principality that eventually was to dominate that part of the world. Although at times overrun by the Hungarians and the Turks the little mark, firmly handled and efficiently administered, first by the Babenberg family and afterwards by the Habsburgs, our Swiss friends whom l mentioned a few pages ago, always came out on top. Eventually these rulers of a petty frontier State even managed to get themselves elected as Emperors of that Holy Roman Empire which was neither Roman nor Holy nor an Empire, but merely a loose federation of all the different German-speaking races. They held this title until the year 1806 when Napoleon threw it on the scrapheap because he intended to put an imperial crown on his own brow.
But even thereafter these not over-brilliant but tenacious Habsburgs managed to keep a finger—and a most important finger—in the German pie, until finally in 1866 Prussia pushed them back across their own mountains and bade them stay where they belonged.
To-day the old Eastern Mark, reduced to the rank of a seventh-rate nation, torn by internal strife and without any hope for a better future, consists, for the greater part, of that mountainous region which is but a continuation of the Swiss Alps, and which contains the remnants of those famous Tyrolean mountains which were handed over to Italy by the Treaty of Versailles on the ground that once upon a time they had been part of the ancient Roman Empire. This mountainous region contains two towns of some importance, Innsbruck, where the ancient route to Italy via the Brenner Pass crosses the river Inn, and where everything reminds one of the Middle Ages, and Salzburg, the birth-place of Mozart, which is one of the most beautiful cities of Europe and which tries to keep alive to-day by providing the world with a few musical and theatrical performances.
Neither these mountains nor those of the Bohemian plateau in the north produce anything of any value. The same can be said of the so-called Viennese basin where the Romans founded an armed camp called Vindobona (or Vienna), a small settlement which gained some notoriety when the famous philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius died there in a.d. 180 after one of his many campaigns against the barbarians of the northern Germanic plains. The town, however, did not come into its own until ten centuries later, when the great migrations of the Middle Ages, commonly called the Crusades, made it the point of departure for those who tried to reach the Promised Land by following the Danube rather than by entrusting themselves to the profiteering ship-owners of Genoa and Venice.
In 1276 it became the residence of the Habsburg family and the centre of their vast domains, which eventually included all the land between the mountain-ranges enumerated a few pages back. In the year 1485 the Hungarians captured the city. In 1529 and again in 1683 the Turks laid siege to it. But the town survived all these misadventures until the beginning of the eighteenth, century, when it began to disintegrate as a result of a mistaken policy which entrusted every position of any importance in the monarchy to noblemen of strictly Germanic origin. Too much power is a hard test for all people, and the amiable Austrian knights were no exception. They ceased to be merely amiable and became feeble and weak.
In the old dual monarchy, 47% of the people were of Slavic origin and only 25% (or one-quarter) were Germans, while the rest consisted of Hungarians (19%) and Rumanians (7%) with about 600,000 Italians (1.5%), and about 100,000 Gypsies who stuck pretty closely to Hungary where they were treated more or less like respectable citizens.
The heavy thumping administered by Napoleon to his dear father-in-law, the Em
peror of Austria, was not without its effects upon the economic and political life of the Austrian Empire, but right up to the outbreak of the Great War Vienna remained the most brilliant, the most socially stand-offish capital in Europe. This was the Vienna of the Blue Danube waltz, the charming city where you were sure of having a good time among delightful people—if you could point to a sufficient number of heraldic quarterings on your family shield! It was all very artificial and out-of-date; but the merchants and the manufacturers made their profits out of the obsolete system, and musicians, actors, artists, and architects found Viennese life much to their liking.
Then came the War—and “Good-bye to ail that!”
The country now called Austria bears practically no resemblance to the empire of which it was the head until only a few years ago. Its future is entirely behind it. It is a State in name only. The refusal of the French to let it join the German Republic was the last straw.
It might just as well be put up for public sale. But who would want to buy it?
Chapter XVII
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DENMARK, AN OBJECT-LESSON WHICH SHOWS THAT A SMALL COUNTRY MAY ENJOY CERTAIN ADVANTAGES OVER LARGE ONES
Denmark is such a tiny country, as modern nations go (it has only about three and a half million inhabitants, of whom 750,000 live in the capital and its suburbs), that we might well pass it by, if quantity rather than quality were of any real importance in the affairs of men. But as an example of what can be made out of indifferent material by the application of intelligence combined with a sensible ideal of life (that ‘moderation in all things’ which the Greeks had proclaimed as the highest form of wisdom) Denmark, as well as the other Scandinavian countries, deserves special and most honourable mention.
The Home of Mankind Page 15