CHAPTER I
THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL, JANUARY, 1919
“How infinitely little is the best that we can do, and how infinitely important it is that we should do it!”
To begin a new book with an old quotation is bad; but it must be forgiven because it expresses in a phrase the sentiment upon which the whole of my public life has been built, and it explains in a sentence the object and purpose of those wanderings in many lands of my colleagues and myself about which I have engaged to write.
Nothing less than a clear understanding on the part of the critical observer that they held very strongly the belief, old-fashioned it may be, that “out of the mouths of babes and sucklings” is strength ordained, can save from the charge of madness or of folly the plunge of twelve members of the British Labour Movement, with a bright hope in their hearts, into the maelstrom of Europe and of European politics in January of 1919.
Mr. Arthur Henderson, M.P., Secretary of the National Labour Party, had made strenuous efforts during the later days of the war, and after his return from Russia, to open a door to international understanding and possible reconciliation by trying to obtain from the British Government permission for representatives of British Labour to attend an international Socialist conference at Stockholm, but without success. Time alone will prove the folly of the Government’s refusal. It is sufficient here to remind the reader that a deep and widespread desire for some attempt at an honourable peace by understanding had existed in Great Britain for nearly two years before the end of the war came. A working women’s organization, the Women’s Peace Crusade, collected in a few weeks nearly 60,000 signatures to a petition for a negotiated peace; and at 133 public meetings addressed in less than a year by myself, with an average attendance of 1,000 persons, was carried a resolution on similar lines, with fewer than thirty dissentients in all. These were small things in themselves, but symptomatic.
So great was the anguish and concern at the time of the Stockholm proposal that a great Conservative London newspaper headed one of its daily leaders with the words: “Hands off the Socialists!”
Whatever may have been the reason for the Government’s refusal to allow British workmen to meet the workmen of other lands at Stockholm, whether on account of French pressure, which was said, or through fear of impairing the moral of the soldiers, which was inferred, they withdrew their opposition after the Armistice, and in January of 1919 we left for Berne and the Second International.
I have the most vivid recollection of that first journey to Europe after the war, probably because it was the first. I think that every delegate felt the same, a revival of faith, a renewal of hope, a quickening of life. For months before the sudden end of the war, acute sadness and cruel pessimism had possessed us all. Ten, twenty, thirty years, the best that life held, had been devoted by one or the other to the building of a better humanity, and this destruction of everything we had worked for, this swift rattling back to the beginning of things, and to worse than the beginning in some ways, was at times too tragic to be borne. But before the opening of new opportunities pessimism promised to fly and hope to return and stay.
“Isn’t it glorious!” shouted Margaret Bondfield to her colleagues as we shot swiftly into Folkestone station.
“Isn’t what glorious?” I asked, thinking she meant our first view of the sea, stretching black and restless beyond the veil of fine rain which dimmed the windows of the railway carriage.
“Why, that we can travel once more, and that we are flying as fast as we can to see the comrades from whom we have been separated so long.” And she waved her passport gaily. “I wonder if Clara Zetkin will be at the conference; and Balabanova? It is ages since I saw Angelica.”
Margaret’s bright face beamed with happiness, and her brown eyes shone like stars as she gathered up her wraps and bags for transport to the boat. She was like a bird set free from the cruel cage that had held her for four tormenting years. She suggested a warm little bird in her looks and manners. Small and brown, with a rich russet colouring of the cheeks, and quick in her movements, there is nothing in the world she resembles so much as the robin with the red breast.
She was one of the delegates representing the Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union Congress. I was a representative of the political side of the Movement. Miss Sophie Sanger was invited to accompany us as interpreter, and was possibly the most practically useful woman of the party. She speaks four languages with equal fluency. What Miss Sanger does not know about the world’s laws regulating labour and labour conditions, especially those affecting women, is said not to be worth knowing; which probably accounts for the fact that she now enjoys an appointment of considerable value and importance in the League of Nations Labour Department.
Mr. Henderson did not travel with us. He had gone ahead several days previously to help M. Huysmans with the final arrangements for the Conference. There had been some slight hitch with the Swiss Government, which at that time was tormented with the fear that we were a body of Bolsheviks out to subvert the loyalty of Swiss citizens. It was necessary to reassure President Ador and his associates on this point. Mr. Henderson was the man to do it. Nobody could look at him, the simple strength and solid respectability of him, and think him a Bolshevik! In spite of assurances given by him, every delegate was obliged to sign a statement repudiating the Bolsheviks and all their works before he was permitted to enter Switzerland!
Mr. J. H. Thomas was also one of the delegates; but whether he was attending a special conference with Mr. Barnes at the Hôtel Majestic in Paris, or whether he was busy settling a strike I cannot remember—strikes were epidemic at this time. He came to Berne later in the week.
The short passage across the Channel was quiet and uneventful. We sat in our deck-chairs well covered with warm wraps. A grey mist soon hid the land from our view. A slight rain moistened our hair and faces. We could not read for excitement and the blowing of the wind. We sat watching our fellow-passengers’ efforts to control their nerves and the busy sailors engaged upon their various tasks.
I do not know why the sentimental confession should be made here, but ever since I was a child chatting to the fishermen on the beach at Redcar I have felt a peculiar liking for the men of the sea. Perhaps it is an inheritance from a seafaring ancestry. It should be in the blood of every Briton. There is something in the brave, blue eyes of the sailor, his jolly frankness, his courage, his simplicity which goes straight to the heart of one. His unending contact with Nature in all her moods has stamped itself upon his being as plainly and unmistakably as the heated atmosphere of the weaving-shed or the smutty environment of the mine have set their mark upon the workers in these places; but in a pleasanter, more wholesome fashion.
In an hour or so we sighted Boulogne. It was raining hard, and the little French town looked very dreary and very dirty. French, British, and Belgian troops in considerable numbers mingled confusingly, the bearded poilu laughingly replying in cockney slang to Tommy’s amusing French. Incredible quantities of war material of all sorts met the eye. The railway track which we crossed from boat to train was a swamp. We had waited till our backs were almost broken with fatigue for the examination of our passports in the smoke-room of the steamer. At that time the element of common sense had not entered in the faintest degree into the organization of this business. Several hundreds of people, packed like sardines in a tin, waited their turn in the crowded ship’s corridor, and as the war had spoilt everybody’s temper and ruined most people’s manners, elbows were freely used to jostle out of their rightful places in the queue the timid and the polite.
A similar rushing, pushing, squeezing, tearing of clothes, wounding of ankles with the sharp edges of boxes, which the owners were too mean to give to the porter or too faithless to trust to him, occurred in the douane. At this time every box was opened and its contents carefully examined. The fatigue was immense. Women fainted and children screamed. Men swore loudly, unashamed. Unperturbed, the blue-uniformed officials pursued their avocation.
Once again an examination of passports, this time by French officials, and again a swaying mass of people in front of the narrow, wooden door, and a hideous scrimmage to enter every time the little French soldier opened it to admit the two or three persons who were permitted to go through at once!
The delegates lost one another in the general confusion. We made a bee-line for the refreshment room as soon as we got through our business, hats awry, hair blown, cheeks flushed with hot air and suppressed fury. Some had lost their umbrellas in the scramble. One missed a good overcoat which he afterwards found. A moderate recovery of spirits and temper followed the appearance on the scene of hot coffee and flaky rolls, the good-natured waitresses smiling a coquettish welcome as we took our seats at the little square tables. Another wave of feeling threatened to overwhelm us when the bill was presented, but this we conquered, and paid up like lords! After all, there were a few food profiteers in England, and it was a little early to complain!
Our indefatigable secretary and comrade, Jim Middleton, had engaged seats for us in the Paris train which left Boulogne two hours after our landing. “Jim,” as he is affectionately and familiarly called by his many friends in the Movement, is one of the rarest souls in the British Labour Party. When the history of the Party comes to be written his name will figure in it very importantly if there is any sense of right and proportion in the historian. What the Labour Party owes already to his selfless and unremitting devotion to the work of its organization can never adequately be estimated or expressed. His is the sort of work which is done quietly, out of the public gaze, with no newspaper advertisement and no clamour of praiseful tongues. But it is there. It is done well and without stint. And it is of the very stuff and fabric of the great machine which Labour is slowly but steadily building for its uses in the struggle for its economic and political emancipation.
Jim is slim and fair as a Norseman. His kind eyes are forget-me-not blue. His blond hair has turned to grey, but he is young. His patience and good nature are inexhaustible. He is never too tired to oblige a friend, and he can always find an excuse for an enemy. He is as good as gold and as true as steel.
So are the other young men on the headquarters staff. There is “little Gillies” as he is everywhere called, whose clear brain and Scottish capacity for hard work have contributed big things to the international side of Labour’s work; and I know no department of future Labour activity more important than the ideas and schemes the Party may develop for the conduct of international relations. By these, even more than by its domestic policy, will Labour government be judged and justified by public opinion.
There is Will Henderson, already a Parliamentary candidate, who will surely follow in his father’s footsteps; Herbert Tracey, excellent writer, full of a fine idealism as well as a practical common sense, who gave rich gifts to the cause until a larger opportunity called him temporarily abroad; Captain Hall, as straight as a die, the Party’s financial secretary; Fred Bramley, the brilliant young under-secretary of the Parliamentary Committee (Trades Congress); E. P. Wake, the very able chief organizer of the Party—but it is impossible to mention them all and the conscientious women who assist them. They are young men of whom any Party is entitled to be proud.
The great strength of the Labour Party lies in the amount of devoted, unpaid work which it is able to command from its members. “But the men you have mentioned are paid good salaries. Why so much praise of men who only do what they are paid to do?” says the carping critic. The query is a common one, and pitifully mean. And it embodies a stupid lie. A few hundred pounds a year is no payment for the work done for the Labour Movement by these admirable servants of the Party from Mr. Arthur Henderson downwards. There are things which cannot be paid for in cash.
We arrived in Paris at seven in the evening. There we stayed several days. We wanted, if possible, a preliminary conversation with certain of the French delegates. We hoped to meet the Belgians. Some of us had designs on the Hôtel Crillon and a possible interview with Colonel House. The Crillon was the headquarters of the American section of the Peace Delegation. Paris, alas! was the ill-chosen seat of the Allies for the Peace Conference. The fate of mankind might have been vastly different had some other centre of discussion been selected.
Paris was likewise a very crowded and uncomfortable city at the time of our visit. Every hotel was full. The enormous staffs of the various national Peace Delegations were a large element in the overcrowding—they, their friends and their visitors. Suppliants to the Conference or to individual members of the Supreme Council were so numerous that hotel accommodation for the ordinary traveller about his simple business scarcely existed; but then the ordinary traveller was not encouraged to travel. A deliberate policy of embarrassment and inconvenience was adopted to persuade him to stay at home; and if he suffered for his wilfulness he had nobody but himself to blame. With a new world in the making, what business abroad had any ordinary person which mattered a tinker’s curse? Thus the official view of affairs.
So that when Miss Bondfield, Miss Sanger, and myself found ourselves without beds, and with no quarters suitable for women to go to, nobody in Paris was surprised. A generous fellow-countryman, hearing of our plight, placed at our disposal his own large and elegant bedroom. There were two beds and a comfortable sofa in it. One of us occupied the sofa for two nights, when we were able to take up our quarters in the Hôtel Moderne overlooking the Place de la Revolution.
Paris immediately after the Armistice was a woeful spectacle of neglect and dirt. It was not much better six months ago. In those early days it was like a handsome slut in need of a bath; which in view of its sufferings was not surprising. The paint on the woodwork of houses and shops was almost all peeled away. Shutters hung awry on their broken hinges. Roads were unspeakably filthy, and full of dangerous holes and swampy gutters. The parks and gardens looked ragged and tattered. The Bois de Boulogne and the Champs Elysées were marred with the shreds and patches of war equipment. Dismal weather made everything look a hundred times worse than it really was. We were wise enough not to come to a hasty judgment about Paris. After all, we had a vast gay literature to contradict the sad story written on Paris when first we saw it!
The living in the hotels and restaurants was riotous and expensive. In the homes of Paris it was another story, we were told. Foods were strictly rationed, but of some kinds it was difficult to get even the meagre portion allowed. The strain was heavy upon the city housewife of the humbler classes. Prices were ruinously high. Wages scarcely kept pace with them. Strikes were frequent and menacing, apt to hold up one or another of the public services at any time, as in England.
But in the public cafés, the dance-halls, and the hotels, nothing dimmed the joyousness of the Parisians, set free at last from the haunting fear of the German invasion. Day and night, and night after night, a lively, exuberant, passionate crowd in each of these public places abandoned itself to an ecstasy of song and dance and play, in utter and unrestrained intoxication.
M. Jean Longuet, the grandson of Karl Marx, and at that time a Deputy in the French Chamber, invited Mr. Macdonald and myself to lunch with him at a little Italian café near his business quarters. We called for him at the office of his newspaper, Le Populaire. On our way all together he took us past the restaurant where Jaurès was shot. He pointed to the window at which Jaurès was sitting at the time of his murder. If I understood him rightly Longuet was present when the awful thing occurred; particularly awful in view of the certainty that the issue of affairs for France might have been infinitely happier, and for Europe infinitely less sorrowful, if this great man had lived during the war.
One of the great scandals of history will be the acquittal of the murderer of Jaurès. He was one of the giant political characters of France. The squalid politicians who govern the affairs of Europe at the present time could never have been where they are if there had not been removed either by force or fraud, or by the ordinary process of nature, death, so many of the great men entitled by intellect or character, sometimes both, to occupy the seats of power. Jaurès was murdered by a common assassin, and official France has seemed to rejoice. But I recall the impressive fact that the most arresting picture in the Chamber of Deputies is the immense canvas of Jaurès addressing the chamber from the tribune. They may have hated him, but they insist on his being remembered!
Jean Longuet was born in London, and speaks excellent English. He is tall and dark, with curly hair and brown eyes. He has a rich voice, and is a very eloquent speaker, full of passion when moved. Friends of his assure me that I may trust his sense of humour, and, in order to present a quick picture of the physical man to an English reader, I may say that when Longuet makes a public oration and warms to his subject he assumes an attitude and appearance which irresistibly remind one of a genius of another sort, Charlie Chaplin. Given Charlie’s creased trousers and big feet, the picture would be complete!
But Longuet is no comic figure in international politics. He is a sincere idealist and a most engaging personality. There are those who would regard this statement as less of a compliment than a comparison with the artist whose amazing gift makes honest fun for millions. This, they say, is much better, and much safer for mankind, than to be the advocate of ideals too lofty for statesmen and people to achieve because too great for them to comprehend; ideals so high that they mean crucifixion for the few who live up to them, and greater degradation for the many who deliberately elect to live below the best they have heard and seen.
The tiny Italian café I sought again on the return trip, but never found it. One delicious dish of macaroni, prepared as only the Italians know how to prepare it, was more pleasing to the taste than all the accumulated delicacies of the best Parisian table d’hôte; for those rich hotel meals were impossible to eat without a thought of the millions who were reputed dead or dying, in fields and ditches, and on roadsides, in their houses, in hospitals, in prison camps, for the lack of a crust of bread or a glass of pure water. Our friend and host of the café we learnt afterwards was a Socialist, and a member of the Party; a fact we had rather inferred from the whispered asides with Longuet during the smoking of cigarettes and the drinking of the wine and coffee.
Our chief business in Paris was to try to persuade the Belgian Socialists to come with us to Berne. They were sitting in conference at Brussels at the time. They had there decided not to attend the Berne Conference, and had sent delegates to Paris to explain the reason why. We met them at the headquarters of the French Socialist Party. All our pleading with them was of no avail. Their conference had so decided, and though they would personally have liked to go, if only for the fellowship of the thing, Party discipline must be maintained. Camille Huysmans would be there as secretary of the International, but they could not go.
Their great difficulty was their unwillingness to meet the German Majority Socialists, who had supported the war and who had not protested against the invasion of Belgium. How could they take part with such men in the building anew of the International? What sort of internationalists had these men proved themselves to be? The German Majority must first express its contrition. Then would be the time to forgive. They could never forget.
“Why do you not come to Berne and say all this to the Germans themselves?” I asked in my speech. “Come and say all you feel about this, where not only the German Majority but the whole world can hear you say it.” I reminded them of the brave and splendid gesture of the Belgian women who came to the International Conference of Women at the Hague while the war was still raging, and who, seated on the right of Miss Jane Addams, with the German women on the left, resolved with them and with the women of all nations represented there to do all in their power to make wars impossible in the future.
“Surely,” I said, “so far as the plain citizens of every country are concerned, we are all in the same boat. We are all far more the victims of circumstance than its architects. We have all been deceived, cheated, lied to. In the clash of various loyalties mistakes are made and cruel things are done and acquiesced in. But is there one of you who, in his heart of hearts, blames any man for taking the part of his country in an international quarrel? Is anyone amongst us quite sure that in the same circumstances we would act otherwise? I refuse to believe that any German Socialist rejoiced over the invasion of Belgium. In any case, is it not better to get face to face and talk it all out, where no false newspaper can come between, and no misunderstanding blind and paralyse, instead of brooding alone over wrongs for which the wrongdoers may be only too ready to atone? Come!”
We left without them. The first meeting of the Second International included no official Belgians. But I left the meeting in Paris with the feeling that the time of complete reunion would come very soon. Eighteen months later in Geneva the Belgians were present, and no more international note was struck in that gathering than the speech of Emile Vandervelde, the Belgian Minister of Justice.
We were obliged to travel from Paris to Berne in two parties, and even then were unable to enjoy sleeping compartments. The trains were packed in every available corner, and many of the passengers were obliged to spend the night in the corridor. There had been an immensity of passport business in Paris, but the burden of all this had been borne by the secretary. He could not save us from the individual examination at the Gare de Lyon, nor the ever-recurring nuisance at intervals along the whole route.
Belgarde is the French frontier town, and here we were hauled out of the train for further torture by passport and Customs officers. It was the outrageous imperturbability of these fellows that made me sick. They seemed devoid of all human feeling. At Belgarde we were roughly questioned about our money. Had we any gold? Had we more than £40 in any kind of currency? More than this sum was not allowed to be taken across the frontier. Later no silver was permitted to be transported. My bags were diligently searched by a woman official, but not one cigarette did she find for her pains, nor wine, nor spirits, nor jewels, nor perfumes, nor any one of the half a hundred things they appeared to be on the prowl to discover.
These performances were repeated at Geneva in the Swiss interests; and half a dozen times between Belgarde and Geneva Swiss police examined our unfortunate passports, which were rapidly assuming a limp and dog’s-eared appearance with so much handling. I never inquired, but I imagine these people were the officials of the various cantons through which the train passed. Any other theory would establish the Swiss Government as insane with fear and suspicion. But finally, through sheer weariness of flesh and spirit, I ceased to question the doings of these minions of the law, but quietly submitted to any number of exasperating formalities.
The Paris train arrived in Geneva at 9 in the morning. The connexion for Berne left at 4.10 in the afternoon. We had ample time to see this famous old city, beautifully placed at one end of the great crescent lake of the same name. Mr. Macdonald, like a true and faithful Scot, left us to visit John Knox’s church. Some lingered over the ample breakfast in the comfortable café. The fascinating lake drew the attention of the rest. It was along the side of this lake that my friend—well, I will not disclose his name—was walking, gaily swinging his stout English walking-stick. He knew two words of French, oui and merci. Humming a gay tune and twirling that stick, he struck a man in the face. “Ah, merci!” he cried, meaning “I beg your pardon.” The man stared in blank astonishment, and then said in good, plain English: “I think it is I who ought to cry ‘Mercy,’ young man.”
Snow lay hard and frozen upon the ground, and capped and covered the mountains in the distance. The vast masses of Mont Blanc were visible in the clear, crisp air. Delivered from the cramped and poisonous conditions of a filthy railway carriage, super-heated, we enjoyed blissfully the bright beauty and clean orderliness of this Puritan capital of French Switzerland. And in the evening, when the last rays of the sun had changed into a glowing pink the white of the Alpine snows, we entered upon the last stage of our long and tiresome journey, to begin our labour of reconciliation.
We were met at the Berne railway station by an odd assortment of European Socialists.
“Willkommen, kameraden,” said a little man with a profusion of long sandy hair and an abundant beard. “Es macht uns Vergnügen die Englischen kameraden wieder zu sehen.” (Welcome, comrades. It is a great pleasure to us to see the English comrades once more.)
I gazed fearfully at this amazing group of people, who looked for all the world like a committee of anarchists ripe for an expedition! They were, in fact, the gentlest of human beings and as pacific as Quakers! The man who welcomed us was Kurt Eisner, President of the Bavarian Republic, who was afterwards murdered in the streets of Munich, in part for the attitude he adopted in this Conference. But in his large-brimmed hat and conspirator’s cloak nothing could have saved him from the suspicion of a raw Englishwoman, unused to the manner of dress and style of speech of so many Socialists in European lands. And those who met us were all alike.
“Comment allez vous, camarades,” exclaimed a French-speaking delegate, and I found myself shaking hands with an even more terrifying apostle of the gospel of Karl Marx, whose brilliant red tie would have served for a railway signal!
I recall a conversation I had with M. Renaudel, at that time the editor of L’Humanité, when we travelled together in Georgia eighteen months later.
“Why do you English Socialists never use the word ‘comrade’ in speaking to each other? In France it is always ‘comrade,’ never ‘monsieur,’ except to the bourgeoisie.”
“The word comrade is often used in England also,” I replied. “I rarely use the word myself, and if you want to know why, my reason is very simple. It is a very beautiful word, but it has been frightfully misused and has lost a good deal of its value. I have heard it so often in the mouths of people who have no more comradely feeling for me than a nest of mosquitoes, that it is now no guarantee to me of real friendship. On the contrary, I am suspicious of those who use it most. It is like that even more beautiful word ‘love,’ which has been cheapened and vulgarized by its misuse until now it means exactly nothing on the lips of most. What value would you attach to the love of somebody who in the same breath expressed the same fervent devotion to a jam tart? ‘Comrade’ means nothing. It is a mere form of expression, a hackneyed formulary. I keep this word for those I know to be truly my friends.”
I told Renaudel of an acquaintance of mine, a Trade Union leader who received a post card from an angry fellow unionist, with a skull and cross-bones at the head. “Dear Comrade,” it began, “What do you mean by selling out like you did? You are getting something good for yourself out of this. You are a liar and a scoundrel! You ought to be shot! Just you wait till I catch you out by yourself! Look out for your dirty hide! You filthy dog! Yours fraternally, B. S.”
It was nearly midnight, and we were worn out with the long journey and sleepless night. Soon we were fast asleep between the spotless white sheets of those exquisite beds, happy in the thought of the morrow’s meeting and its possibilities.