Unfinished Victory - Arthur Bryant(1940)

 UNFINISHED VICTORY—ARTHUR BRYANT (1940)

CHAPTER  I 
FAMINE OVER EUROPE 
“I saw in vision the worm in the wheat 
And in the shops nothing for people to eat; 
Nothing for sale in Stupidity Street.” 
Ralph Hodgson 

In the middle of the war famine came to central Europe. As other combatants fell away, the two most powerful and dogged nations in the world, Britain and Germany, settled down to death grips. Germany’s weapon was the giant machine — militarism ruthless and enthroned — that directed every activity to one purpose, victory by battle. Britain possessed a weapon still more terrible. By the invisible use of sea power, with its far armada of shadowy masts and guns lurking among the barren islands of the north, the strength of Britain was exercised not against the fighting man but against every man, woman and child living in the territories of the Central Powers. 
When Germany retaliated with unrestricted submarine warfare — the inexcusable and indubitably illegal murder of defenceless women and children, as it seemed to us — the war became a starving match between the two greatest commercial nations of Europe. To both trade was a necessity: both had to import or die. Had the fight gone the other way, Britain, with her dependence on foreign foodstuffs, would have perished in a few weeks. There were moments, as in the spring of 1917, when she looked like doing so, when one out of every four ships that left her shores failed to return, and when her most famous admiral declared that she could not sustain the war into 1918. 
But the British Navy held the trump cards after all. The Unterseebooten were mastered. ` The blockade continued. Slowly the noose of starvation tightened round Teuton bodies. For long an obstinate people, less immediately vulnerable in their dependence on trade than their enemies, held out. But the end was certain. The cold, remorseless pressure of the Admiralty never weakened. 
One saw its consequences in the German food-lines in the industrial towns, where pale-faced, depressed-looking women who had never set eyes on the sea stood motionless in long queues in the wind and rain for the bare necessities of life. For potatoes, for beet, for flour, for coal, for soap and washing powder, for shoes and clothing and thread, the womenfolk of Germany and Austria-Hungary waited morning after morning for four grey years. | 
After 1917 the bread, fat and milk were distributed by rationing zones, but for the other commodities the food-lines remained. Often when those at the end of the line reached the shop after hours of standing and shuffling, there was nothing left to buy. At the fringe of the line policemen stood to keep order and drive away the human jackals, who watched for their opportunity in the pinched faces and strained, anxious eyes of the younger and prettier girls. An American visitor to the working-class quarters of Berlin, Vienna and Budapest in the winter of 1916 could not find one face in the food-lines that did not show signs of hunger. “In the case of the young women and the children the skin was drawn down to the bone and bloodless. Eyes had fallen deeper into the sockets. From the lips all colour had gone and the tufts of hair that fell over parchmented foreheads seemed dull and famished.”
As the war continued, the rations distributed grew increasingly meagre. Even by the end of 1916 the allowance of eggs was down to one per head per week, and potatoes — for many the staple and sometimes sole dietary — to a few pounds. In the summer of 1918 it was reckoned that among the urban population of Germany the daily consumption had sunk from the 2280 calories regarded as the indispensable minimum in pre-war days to a bare 1000. That of flour fell from 320 grams to 160, of meat and fat from 1050 to 135, and of butter from 28 to 7. In Vienna in the autumn of 1918 the flour ration was down to a quarter of a pound a week. Milk was almost unobtainable and was reserved solely for nursing mothers and children. In the first year of the war alone, the daily milk supply of Berlin dropped from a million to a hundred and fifty thousand litres. 
In the last two years of the war, nearly 800,000 non-combatants died in Germany from starvation or diseases directly attributed to under-nourishment — about fifty times more than were drowned by submarine attacks on British shipping. The biggest mortality was among children between the ages of five and fifteen, where the death-rate increased by 55 per cent. Tuberculosis alone accounted for 145,000 civilian deaths in 1918, or double the pre-war figure. Adding the death-roll of the Austro-Hungarians, those whom the blockade killed alone exceeded the million British fighters who fell in action. Such, for those who do not possess it is the effect of sea power. And such — in a far more terrible and sudden form - would be the fate of the people of these overcrowded islands if, through their own neglect or rashness, they ever lost that power. 
This human wastage was accompanied by every circumstance of misery. Pleasure and vitality went out of the lives of more than a hundred million people. The food with which men and women fought their long losing battle against starvation was of the most miserable quality. The bread was dark-brown in colour, sometimes like clay in composition and sometimes dry and brittle with fragments of straw and sand buried in it. It had a sour flavour and caused indigestion and heartburn. Jam was made of turnip, tea of blackberry leaves and nutshells or the flowers of the lime-tree, coffee of beans. Many people subsisted for weeks on a sweet greenish pulp made of potatoes that had frozen in transit through the deterioration of rolling stock. Clover and the leaves of field plants took the place of cabbages and carrots: and dogs and cats vanished from the streets. 
In the luxury hotels of Berlin hungry fashionables regaled themselves on such refinements of the time as aniline “foam” cakes, dry grass tea and ingenious deceptive dishes compounded of the white of egg and gelatine. One was hungry within an hour even after the most expensive meal. Sweet things were virtually unattainable… 
All real food was kept for the fighting man… Food was the staple subject of conversation for all classes. In the co-operative dining-rooms of Vienna famous poets, painters, architects and musicians, now penniless, begged humbly for their daily pittance of soup. The last days of the old Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria were made bitter by his people’s cry for bread. The word “want’’ was writ large across the whole of central Europe. 
The same all-consuming need touched every department of life. Every scrap and crumb had to be saved. Old rags and iron had become precious as gold: the very sweepings of the street fetched fancy prices. At the University of Dresden the students carried the contents of their waste-paper baskets once a fortnight to the local paper dealer to be exchanged for the wherewithal to buy minute quantities of food. Many schools had to be closed down in the winter because of the lack of lighting in the streets. In the country, bands of children scoured the hedges for berries. Everything capable of conversion into one of the innumerable commodities which that unsleeping Navy withheld was required for Ersatz. 
Ersatz was the word of the time. It comprised every sort of substitute, from concoctions of gelatine made to look like white sugar to clothes and boots and dainty leather-looking suitcases made of paper. There was a grim joke current in 1918 of a man who ate an Ersatz beefsteak of so revolting a nature that he resolved to make an end of his life. But the rope he bought to hang himself broke, being Ersatz, and the poison he bought to swallow was Ersatz too, and did him no harm. So he was forced to go on existing.
It was not only food that was lacking. New clothes and linen were beyond the reach of all but the richest. The only people who could afford them were food profiteers, speculators and landowners…
A typical case that came before a School Care Committee in the summer of 1919 helps one to realise what all this meant to the individual citizen. A war widow — there were nearly a million of them in the country at the time — had eight children ranging in age from four to fourteen…
One child has caught scabies . . . another has an infectious skin disease (impetigo). Naturally the whole family are infected. Hardly had they got over one illness than another sets in. 
The mother has to go to work as the means left by her husband are insufficient to procure the necessities of life. She cannot carry out the treatment for the illnesses. She goes to hospital with her eight children, at the expense of the State. Hardly has the family been dismissed from the hospital than the twelve-year-old daughter gets discharging glands on her arm. The child has to wear the same woollen frock for weeks without it being washed (lack of soap). The mother has, of course, seen the trouble and wanted to bandage the arm, but she has no old linen. It is impossible to buy bandages on account of the high prices.
The poor woman was the kind of person whom, in the almost inevitable mood then prevailing in England, one spoke of as a Hun and regarded as collectively and individually responsible for the war. 
Lack of soap and warm water —for the great majority coal was almost unprocurable, — lack of bed and personal linen reduced a cleanly and frugal people to a race of slatternly scarecrows. Such soap as there was, made of a gritty, earthy mixture minus any fats, played havoc with threadbare garments, sheets and towels. Faced by such obstacles, even the finest characters degenerated. Many wearied, starving women, who were denying themselves their own rations to feed their children, gave up even trying to be clean. In infant welfare centres after the war it was common to find new-born babies and nurslings with sores up to the armpits. Among the working classes, conditions of indescribable filth prevailed in houses that had formerly been spotless. Children slept on vermin-crawling mattresses of old wastepaper — straw was too precious for such use, being needed for bread — and it was common to find two or three adults sharing a bed without sheets. The evil was aggravated by the compression of living space caused by the complete cessation of house-building during the war. Paint was practically unprocurable. Its lack reduced the whole of central Europe to a uniform, colourless grey which was matched by the faces of the people…
The consequences of this on the health and morale of the civilian population was one of the most terrible of all the evils of the war. The whole of central Europe, comprising 150 millions, was sick, physically and spiritually. The average weight of the urban population sank by 20 per cent. Tuberculosis, phthisis, dysentery, intestinal catarrh and other diseases caused or aggravated by under-nourishment were rampant: at Nuremberg after the war 50 per cent of the children had T.B. The hospitals, suffering as they were from the universal want, could do little…
The heaviest weight of the blockade fell on nursing mothers: the incidence of puerperal fever doubled. Owing to the lack of feeding stuffs for the cattle, milk was not only scarce but of the poorest quality. The consequent fall in the birth-rate is reckoned to have cost Germany three and a half million future citizens, which with her two million war dead and her close on a million starved, brought her war losses to over six millions or nearly 10 per cent of her population. Children born during the latter part of the blockade averaged only four or five Pounds in weight. In Bohemia in February 1919, 20 per cent of the babies were born dead and 40 per cent were dying within the first month of birth. A visitor to Cologne hospital in the same year reported boys and girls of six years old with tiny, shrivelled bodies covered with queer, inelastic skin that could be moved about in folds or smoothed flat, soft skulls that yielded to pressure, and bones so soft that they could be bent by the touch. Wherever the German poor were gathered together in that starving time, an unpleasant odour assailed the nostrils. It reminded those who first noticed it of the smell of a distant corpse. It was the symptom of a universal malnutrition, of the waste of tissue in underfed bodies undergoing a process of decay not dissimilar to that which sets in at death. 
That there was no compunction for all this among the English — a humane people — is a testimony to the mesmeric powers of modern war. It is not true to say that the English did not know that German women, children and old men were starving, for they were frequently told so in the columns of their newspapers. But after a few weeks of war losses and propaganda, one ceased to think of one’s official enemies as human beings. Fat Hans tightening his belt and whining about his meagre rations was a good joke even in so respectable and humanitarian journal as Punch. The enemy’s occasional and always promptly flouted feelers for peace were set down as the cowardly reaction of greedy appetites to a perpetual diet of sardines. That starvation implied anything more in terms of human suffering never occurred to the people of triple-guarded Britain. One sardonic jest of the period — it was never clear whether it was intended as a joke or an atrocity — was the story that the Germans boiled down their war dead in corpse factories to make substitute butter. 
But though the kindly English were cheered by the news that hunger was playing havoc with their enemies’ wives and little ones, they never for one moment pictured the reality of it. They had commanded the wealth of the world for so long that it was not easy for them even to conceive of starvation: Of the imminent possibility of themselves being starved into submission by the submarine campaign they were kept in blissful ignorance by the censor. 
The bulk of the population never knew how near the U-boats came to triumph, or realised what it would have meant to them had they done so. 
As for the British rationing schemes at the end of the war, they seldom amounted to much more than an inconvenience to the well-to-do classes. Food queues, ration cards and a dearth of certain commodities were a burden to the poor and at times a very real hardship, but they never constituted a major tragedy. Lord Rhondda, the Food Controller, and Sir Arthur Yapp, formerly of the Y.M.C.A., respectfully invited people to eat a little less… The meaning of war as it was understood by her enemies was never really brought home to her civilian population. 
It was this that explains the first of the tragic mistakes that threw away the victories of 1918, unwittingly betrayed the dead and led imperceptibly but inevitably to the present situation of Europe. In November 1918, sooner than face another winter of starvation, the German people, broken by blockade, forced their Government to surrender. But though the rain of shells and bullets ceased, the war against non-combatants continued. In fact it was intensified, for the Baltic, hitherto open to German merchantmen and fishermen, was now closed by the British Navy. 
The rough fish that had helped to eke out the people’s starvation rations ceased altogether. Despite the entreaties of the German delegates — and it should be added of the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army — Article 26 of the Armistice laid it down that all German ships found on the high seas should be sequestered. It was not that men like Foch and Clemenceau were inhuman, but, like the war-worn people they represented, they had long ceased to regard Germans as fellow creatures. The ditch that had divided the peoples of Europe for four years had been dug too deep for bridging. 
It was only by degrees that tales of the plight of Germany began to percolate to the Allied countries. At first they were disbelieved or contemptuously rejected as what the most popular of English dailies described as a “Hun Food Snivel”. The millions who had suffered from the war, and especially those who had lost their loved ones or endured the insolences of rapine and invasion, felt no compunction at the thought that the cruel enemy was at last cringing on his knees. They did not visualise his suffering in terms of hollow-eyed, despairing women and tragic children with vast pulpy heads tubercular bones and shrivelled bodies. They would certainly have acted otherwise had they done so. It is a tantalising reflection to think how much unhappiness and bitterness Europe might have been spared had the peace dictators met not in Paris but in starving Berlin or Vienna or even on the Rhine. 
It was in Britain and America to their honour that among the victors men first began to awake to the realisation of what was happening to their former foes. A handful of Anglo-Saxon pioneers, travelling in the terra incognita of central Europe on military or political business, were suddenly made aware of the presence of a vast human calamity. For as they gazed out of the train or from the windows of their hotels, they saw a wintry world that bore no resemblance to that which they had left behind —a country of dimmed lights and of shabby, broken-down houses…
The people in the streets were like pale ghosts, listless and dejected with sunken yellow cheeks, flat breasts and hollow eyes. If one had the money, it is true one could stay at luxurious hotels and sit among well-dressed people — rich Jews from Galicia or native profiteers — eating and drinking fabulously expensive food and wine. It was not here that the strangers from afar sensed the breath of famine in the air. There was little actual starvation in the streets, for the Germans are a proud and sensitive people. Emaciated women of the better classes put rouge on their cheeks to hide their unnatural pallor. 
It was to attics and cellars that lonely want retired to die. 
An anonymous visitor to Germany — a Quaker — wrote in that first winter of the peace: ‘‘The picture is etched upon my mind. A man emaciated, half clothed, propped up between a perambulator and a tiled stove, feeding the baby he was too weak to lift. He was feeding the baby with a paste made of black bread and cooked in water with the addition of a little lard and salt. That was the only food he had.” “The starvation is done quietly and decently at home. And when death comes, it comes in the form of influenza, tuberculosis, heart-failure or one of the new and mysterious diseases caused by the war, it carries off its exhausted victims.” At Frankfurt, even as late as March 1920, the funerals never ceased all day. 
It was the testimony of such travellers that provided the first frail bridges for reviving humanity…
Yet the process of awakening realisation was tragically slow. At the first renewal of the Armistice on December 13th, Germany made a plea — pathetic in the light of her former strength — for leave to import wheat, fats, maize, oats, rice, condensed milk, meat extracts and medical stores. Though renewed German resistance was now out of the question, and though a clause had been appended to the original Armistice terms that “the Allies and the United States contemplate the provisioning of Germany to such an extent as shall be found necessary”, the request was rejected. So a month later was a German proposal that in return for the surrender of her merchant marine, which the Allies were demanding, she should be permitted to purchase two and a half million tons of urgently needed foodstuffs to tide her over till the harvest. 
Meanwhile the sufferings of the German people grew daily worse. Though more than a quarter of a year had elapsed since the Armistice, not only was the last remaining sea closed to her, but artificial divisions created by the new military frontiers were creating havoc with the ordinary economic life of her people. On March 1st, the Manchester Guardian — always to the fore in discovering and exposing suffering — published an article from a special correspondent in Düsseldorf where an appalling increase in infant mortality had occurred owing to the French stoppage of the city’s normal milk supply from the farmlands on the opposite bank of the Rhine. Three days later the same paper published a manifesto by the German Republican Government at Weimar: We cannot feed ourselves from our own supplies till next harvest. The blockade is eating away the vitals of our people. Thousands are perishing daily from malnutrition. 
Similar voices, inspired by tales of suffering brought home by explorers, now began to be heard in the House of Commons. A Conservative back-bencher, Lord Henry Bentinck, declared that the whole of Europe east of the Rhine was in danger of starvation and that the terrible thing was that Britain, by maintaining its blockade, was chiefly responsible for it. “No attempt”, he said, “has been made by any English public man to justify this cruel and wicked proceeding, no doubt because no man felt equal to the task.” “The Secretary of State for War, Mr. Winston Churchill, plainly did not, for he expressed his opinion that the sooner we put an end to the blockade which was destroying women and children and sick people in Germany, the better it would be for ourselves and the world — an opinion which was warmly endorsed by Mr Bonar Law, the Tory leader. A few days later the National Council of the Independent Labour Party passed a resolution calling for the immediate raising of the blockade so that the starving nations of Europe could be given a chance to feed themselves and begin the urgent work of economic reconstruction. 
Yet all this made only a slow and gradual impression on a House of Commons largely composed of ‘‘hard-faced men who looked as if they had done very well out of the war ” and who had been returned to Parliament in support of the policy of squeezing the lemon till the pips squeaked. Nor did it rouse any echo in the bulk of the people, who were preoccupied in licking the wounds of four years’ warfare and returning as quickly as possible to their own long-neglected affairs. The ordinary Briton was not un-naturally fed up with the Continent and did not want to be reminded of it. His favourite newspapers were quick to note his mood. Anger against the Hun was succeeded by indifference. And the Prime Minister, though with his quick Welsh prescience well aware of what ailed Europe, was peculiarly sensitive to the atmosphere of those from whom he derived support. He did nothing. 
It was the British fighting men on the Rhine who first drew the serious attention of the Government to the inhumanity of its policy. On March 10th a Reuter’s report appeared in the press that Mr. Lloyd George had received a strongly worded telegram from Lord Plumer, the British General commanding on the Rhine, urging that food should be immediately supplied to the suffering population on whom his troops were billeted. They were unable, he said, to endure the spectacle of starving children. Soon afterwards stories began to be published of British officers who had told correspondents that they had not fought for four years in order to watch German children dying of hunger six months after the war was over. Such stories were perhaps exaggerated, but there was no doubt that the feeling of the Army was too strong to be ignored. Unlike the civilians at home, the Tommies at Cologne did not need to rely on their imagination to picture the reality of hunger. They saw it with their own eyes and were compelled to live with those who suffered it. 
It was this intervention of the British soldier that procured the first real mitigation of the blockade. On March 16th Germany, unable to resist any longer, agreed to hand over her merchant fleet. The second greatest exporting nation in Europe delivered to her conquerors thirty-two million tons of shipping including every vessel of more than 1600 tons. In return she was allowed to make monthly purchases up to a maximum of 300,000 tons of cereals and 70,000 tons of fat, including pork, vegetable oil and condensed milk. Even this fell short of the country’s minimum requirements. It was not till May that anything like substantial imports entered Germany. The blockade itself continued till the middle of July. 
Looking back on it from a calmer and less war-racked age, all this may one day appear hard to justify. At the time it seemed not only explicable but inevitable. Only a year before the Germans had been on the point of victory, and the British Army, rallied by Haig’s famous order, was fighting with its back to the wall. The chief factor in the salutary and amazing transformation that had followed had been the withholding power of the British Navy. Now that the victors’ armies were melting away under the popular clamour for demobilisation, it seemed unwise to cautious minds to discard that one decisive weapon until the future peace of mankind had been secured by a strong peace. “We have all demobilised so quickly”, wrote an English diplomat in his diary in March 1919, “that we cannot enforce our terms except by the blockade which is hell.” (H, Nicolson, Peacemaking, p. 287.)
From all this followed tragic consequences of which we have still not reached the end. There can be very few over the age of 25 in Germany today who have not suffered the pangs of prolonged hunger and been taught to attribute those pangs to the inhumanity of other countries. For nine years, six of which were after the war, the bulk of the German people suffered profoundly — physically, morally and spiritually. Nearly a year after the Armistice a little German girl could ask her mother if it were true that there were countries in the world where there was no war and where people could eat all they wanted. In 1920 the Mayor of Essen reported that of 75,000 school children at least 25,000 had not even the most necessary clothing. A member of the Hoover Mission to the schools of the Erzgebirge in the previous year described children of seven or eight years with tiny faces, huge, puffed, rickety foreheads and swollen, pointed stomachs hanging over crooked, match-like legs. 
Few elements in the German nation except the very basest escaped that prolonged and useless martyrdom…
As for the poor — the vast bulk of the defeated German people — they were deprived for years of everything that could sweeten life. Whole families were crowded into a single room bare of all furniture save perhaps a couple of broken chairs and a bare table. Everything else had long ago gone to the pawnshop. In 1919, when the minimum weekly subsistence level was calculated at 330 marks, 77 per cent of the population of Berlin were receiving an average wage of 162 marks a week, of which 10 per cent had to be paid in indemnity tax to the victorious Allies. It was small wonder that fifteen years later when Communism had ceased to make an appeal to the German urban worker, the feeling of hatred against the victors of Versailles survived — a potent and terrible force in the hands of the new chauvinist. 
Most hardly of all could the women-folk of Germany forgive the prolonged agony of their own and their children’s starvation which no principle could explain or justify to them. To them the continued blockade was unintelligible. Even during the war they had been unable to view it as anything but cruel and barbarous. They regarded it just as English folk did the drowning of their own defence-less non-combatants by submarines. They did so with even greater feeling, because the effects of the blockade injured not merely a few travellers but themselves and everyone around them. An American visitor to Berlin in 1916 was assailed by women asking why the United States Government did not intervene to prevent the British Navy’s breaches of international law and of the Hague and London Conventions. For years the blockade was the dominant obsession of the entire German people. It was in the hope of defeating it and saving the wastage of its civilian population that Germany resorted to the desperate and terrible expedient of unrestricted submarine warfare and so brought America into the alliance against her. It was despair of ending it in any other way that caused her, eighteen months later, to submit to the terms of the Armistice. 
It was when the hated blockade still continued after these had been accepted that the indignation of the German people against Britain became something deeper and more permanent than wartime hysteria. Eighteen years after, a member of the Allies’ Military Mission of Control which took up residence in Germany at the beginning of 1920, recalled how painful it was, in view of the widespread evidence of real distress, to be asked, “Why did England go on starving our women and children long after the Armistice?” 
However deplorable and terrible in their results present German methods, however evil to free minds their form of government, and loathsome their brutality towards the weak, it is necessary, if one would understand their psychology, to remember what Germans can never forget. It is because so few of our own people — even our statesmen — seem conscious of it that I have tried to retell the mournful story of it here. It explains why the German people found it so hard to understand the sincerity of even the most obviously honest British protestations of humanity and goodwill towards them. It explains more. For the long years of hunger left their impress not only on the memory of those who suffered, but on the nervous organism of millions of Germans. A whole generation grew up in an epoch of under-nourishment and misery such as we have never in this country experienced. 
It was a return to a state which Germany had known once before in her tragic history, when more than two-thirds of her people perished from the privations of the Thirty Years War. It makes intelligible much that is otherwise unaccountable in Nazi Germany — the hysteria, the emotionalism and the lack of proportion. One cannot render a whole nation physically, mentally and morally prostrate for years without its producing a dangerous effect. “Starvation which brings to some lethargy and a helpless despair, drives other temperaments to the nervous instability of hysteria and to a mad despair.” (J.M. Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace, p.213.)
Blockade or siege culminating in starvation has always been held a legitimate exercise of war. It has been used against every besieged town since the trade of soldiering began… So long as ordeal by battle continues to be the ultimate method of resolving disputes between nations, starvation blockade will remain, as it has always been, a weapon of war. Like every other weapon its capacity to inflict destruction has increased out of all measure with the advance of the scientific and mechanical means of enabling man to magnify his activities. Where once it slew its thousands, it can now in its universal application take its toll of millions. It leaves behind it psychological reactions that endure long afterwards and sow in human hearts the seeds of other wars and other agonies for the suffering race of man.
ARTHUR BRYANT (1940)