The World of Yesterday

  That pleasant dizziness transferred to my mind as well. Every tree seemed to me more beautiful, every mountain had a greater air of freedom about it, every landscape was lovelier—for in a country at war the blessed sight of a meadow seems to the sad eyes of its people like impertinence on the part of indifferent Nature, every crimson sunset reminds them of all the blood that has been shed. But here, in a natural state of peace, Nature’s indifference seemed noble, right and proper again, and I loved Switzerland more than I had ever loved it before. I had always liked visiting the country, a delightful place of inexhaustible variety within its small territory. But never before had I felt the force of its ideals so much—the Swiss idea of the co-existence of originally different nationalities in the same place without hostility, its ability to take that wisest of maxims and, by dint of mutual respect within an honest democratic system, raise linguistic and national differences to a sense of fraternity. What an example to the rest of our confused continent of Europe! A place of refuge from all kinds of persecution, the native land of peace and freedom for centuries, hospitable to all opinions while faithfully preserving its own unique qualities—how important the existence of this one supranational state was for the world as a whole! It seemed to me only right that Switzerland was blessed with beauty and wealth. No one need feel a stranger here; all free and independent human beings were more at home in Switzerland at this time of worldwide tragedy than in their own native lands. I went walking through the streets of Zurich and on the banks of the lake for hours by night. The lights shone peacefully, the citizens here still lived their lives at ease. I seemed to sense that there were no women lying awake behind the windows, unable to sleep for thinking of their sons; I saw no maimed or wounded men, no young soldiers who would be loaded into trains tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. You felt justified in being alive here, whereas in a country at war an unmutilated body seemed almost something to be ashamed of.

  But my first, most pressing wish was not to discuss the performance of my play or meet my Swiss and other friends. Most of all I wanted to see Rolland, the man who, I knew, could help me to be firmer and more active and clarify my mind. I also wanted to thank him for what his words and his friendship had meant to me in days of bitter mental isolation. He must be the first person I saw, and so I immediately went to Geneva. And now the two of us, supposed to be enemies, were in a rather complicated position. Naturally, the governments of the opposing countries did not like to see their citizens mingling on friendly terms, while on neutral ground, with the citizens of ‘hostile’ nations. On the other hand, there was no law against it. There was not a single clause forbidding meetings on pain of some penalty. Only business dealings, ‘trafficking with the enemy’, were banned and regarded as high treason, and so as not to incur suspicion of the faintest infringement of that law, we made a point of not offering one another a cigarette, because there was no doubt that we were being watched all the time by countless secret agents. So as the simplest way of avoiding any suspicion of having a guilty conscience or reason to feel afraid, we two friends of different nationalities were perfectly open about it. We did not write to each other under a cover address or poste restante, we did not steal away in secret to meet by night, but instead walked down the street and sat in cafés together in full view of everyone. As soon as I had arrived in Geneva and given my full name at the registration desk of my hotel, I said I would like to speak to Monsieur Romain Rolland, just because it would make things easier for the German and French intelligence services if they could report back saying who I was and whom I was visiting. To us, of course, it was perfectly natural for two old friends not to keep out of one another’s way all of a sudden because they happened to be of different nationalities, and their nations were at war. We did not feel it our duty to act absurdly because of the absurd behaviour of the world.

  So there I was in his room at last—and it looked almost the same as his room in Paris. I saw his chair and a table piled high with books, exactly as before. The desk was overflowing with journals, documents and papers. He was working in the usual plain, almost monastic cell that he created around him wherever he went—but a monastic cell connected with the whole world. For a moment I could not think of a word to say in greeting; we just shook hands. Rolland’s was the first French hand that I had been able to take for three years, he was the first Frenchman I had spoken to for those three years, yet in that time we had come closer to each other than ever before. I could speak to him in French more freely and with more familiarity than I could talk to anyone in German at home in Austria. I was well aware that in my friend’s presence I was looking at the most important man of our time, and the moral conscience of Europe was speaking to me. Only now could I appreciate all that he was really doing, and had done, in his fine work to promote international understanding. Working night and day, always alone, without any assistant or secretary, he kept track of everything that was going on in every country, he wrote to countless correspondents who turned to him for advice on matters of conscience, he wrote pages and pages of his diary every day. He had a greater sense than anyone else in those times of his responsibility to do what he could at a historical moment, and he felt a need to leave it on record for posterity. (I wonder what has happened to those many handwritten volumes of diaries that will one day provide a complete account of all the moral and intellectual conflicts of the First World War? Where are they now?) At the same time he was publishing articles, every one of which was an international sensation at the time, and working on his novel Clerambault—it all illustrated his commitment, the unceasing, constant, self-sacrificing commitment of his entire existence to the vast responsibility he had assumed of setting an example, always acting humanely and with justice in the fit of madness then afflicting humanity. He left no letter unanswered, no pamphlet on the problems of the day unread. It was this frail, delicate man, whose health was seriously threatened at this of all times, who could speak only softly and always had to struggle with a slight cough, who could never go out into the open air without a scarf and had to keep stopping to rest if he had been walking fast, who now showed improbable strength of character in dealing with the demands made on him. Nothing could shake him, no attack, no perfidy; he looked clearly and fearlessly at the turmoil of the world. I saw the heroism of his mind, intellectual and moral heroism like a memorial in the shape of a living man. Perhaps I have not described Rolland fully enough even in my book on him, because when a writer’s subject is still alive he feels some reservations about praising him to the skies. Even days after seeing him in that tiny room, from which powerful influences invisibly radiated out to all parts of the world, I could still feel in my blood how shaken and, if I may say so, cleansed I had been by our meeting. And I know that the invigorating, bracing force exerted by Rolland in his fight alone, or almost alone, against the senseless hatred of millions is one of those imponderables that cannot be measured or calculated. Only we, the contemporaries who knew him, realise what his character and his exemplary steadfastness meant at the time. The moral conscience of a Europe run mad lived on in him.

  In our conversations that afternoon and during the next few days, I felt the slight melancholy latent in all he said, something I had also felt when discussing the war with Rilke. He was full of bitterness against the politicians who could never get enough foreign sacrifices to satisfy their national vanity. At the same time, his sympathy always went out to those who were suffering and dying for something that they themselves did not understand and that was in fact sheer nonsense. He showed me a telegram from Lenin who, before leaving Switzerland in his famous sealed train, had urged him to go to Russia with him because he knew what a boost Rolland’s moral authority would give his own cause. But Rolland had set his mind firmly against supporting any one group. He wanted to continue independently serving a single cause, the common cause of humanity. Just as he never demanded unthinking acceptance of his own ideas, he declined to be linked with anyone. Those who loved him should, he t
hought, also remain independent, and the only example he wished to set was to show how we can remain free and stand up for our own convictions, even against the opposition of the whole world.

  On my first evening in Geneva I also met the little group of French and other foreigners working on two small independent newspapers, La Feuille and Demain—P J Jouve, René Arcos, and Frans Masereel.2 We became close friends at once, taking an instant liking to each other in a way that usually happens only in youth. But we instinctively felt that we stood at the beginning of a whole new life. Most of our old connections were not so close any more; former comrades had been dazzled by the spirit of patriotism. We needed new friends, and as we were all fighting on the same front, in the same trenches of the mind and intellect and against the same enemy, a kind of passionate comradeship formed spontaneously between us. After twenty-four hours we were as familiar with each other as if we had known one another for years, and we were already using the familiar ‘du’, as men usually do on every front line. We were all aware—we few, we happy few, we band of brothers3—of both our personal danger and the audacity of our meeting like this. We knew that five hours’ journey away any German who saw a Frenchman and any Frenchman who saw a German would charge at him with a bayonet or throw a grenade at him, and get a decoration for it; we knew that millions on both sides dreamt only of annihilating their adversaries and wiping them off the face of the earth; we knew that newspaper columnists almost foamed at the mouth whenever they mentioned ‘the enemy’, while we, a tiny handful among those millions upon millions, were not only sitting peacefully around the same table but doing so in an honest, even a consciously impassioned spirit of fraternity. We knew how that set us against all that was official and within the rules, we knew that by declaring loyal friendship for each other we were placing ourselves in danger in our native lands, but the sense of our audacity in itself took what we were doing to almost ecstatic heights. We wanted to do something daring, and we enjoyed it, for only its daring gave our protest real weight. I even gave a public reading with P J Jouve in Zurich, a unique event for the First World War, he reading his poems in French, I reading extracts from my Jeremiah in German—and just by putting our cards on the table so openly we showed that we were playing our bold game honestly. We didn’t mind what they thought of it in our consulates and embassies, even if it meant that, like Cortez,4 we were burning the boats that would have taken us home. For our minds were deeply imbued by the idea that we were not the traitors, those were the writers who betrayed the artist’s mission to humanity when it suited them. How heroic these young Frenchmen and Belgians were! Among them was Frans Masereel, carving an enduring graphic monument of protest against the horrors of war before our eyes in his woodcuts, haunting images in black and white that, in their forceful anger, are equal even to Goya’s Desastres de la guerra. Day and night, he worked tirelessly cutting new scenes and figures out of the silent wood, his small room and his kitchen were both full of his woodcut blocks, and every morning La Feuille printed another of his graphic accusations. They accused not one particular nation, but our joint enemy, the war. We dreamt of being able to distribute them over cities and armies by dropping them from aircraft, like bombs, so that anyone, even without words or a knowledge of languages, could understand their grim, savage denunciations. I am sure they would have stopped the war in its tracks. But unfortunately they appeared only in that little paper La Feuille, which was hardly read at all outside Geneva. Everything we said and tried to do was confined to Switzerland, and took effect only when it was too late. Privately we did not delude ourselves—we were powerless against the mighty machinery of general staffs and political offices, and if they did not pursue us it may have been because we could not endanger them, since all we said was stifled and we had little freedom of action. But the very fact that we knew how few and alone we were brought us closer together, fighting side by side, heart to heart. Never again, in my more mature years, did I know such enthusiastic friendship as in those days in Geneva, and it stood the test of all later times.

  From the psychological and historical—though not the artistic—point of view the most remarkable figure in this group was Henri Guilbeaux; in him, more than anyone else, I saw affirmation of the irrefutable law of history that in times of abrupt political upheaval, particularly during war or revolution, courage and daring will do more in the short term than steadiness of character. When time surges on at breakneck speed, those who can fling themselves into its torrential waves without hesitation have a head start. And at that time, the torrent raised many fundamentally lightweight figures such as Béla Kun and Kurt Eisner above their natural level to positions for which they were not really adequate. Guilbeaux, a slender, blond little man with keen, restless grey eyes and a liking for fiery harangues, was not himself greatly gifted. Although he had translated my poems into French almost a decade earlier, if I am to be honest I must describe his literary talent as slight. His command of language was no more than average, his education not profound; his one gift was for polemics. An unfortunate character trait made him one of those men who always have to be opposing something and do not really mind what. He was happy only if he could strike out like a street urchin, mounting an attack on some stronger opponent. In Paris before the war, although at heart he was a kind man, he had always been vigorous in attacking various literary trends and figures. Then he moved into radical circles, where no one was radical enough for him. Now, as an anti-militarist in wartime, he had suddenly found himself a vast enemy—the Great War itself. The anxiety and timidity of the majority, while he threw himself into the struggle with bold audacity, made him important and even indispensable in world affairs for a brief moment. He was attracted to what deterred others—danger. The fact that those others would dare so little and he alone so much gave this fundamentally insignificant man of letters sudden stature, enhancing his journalistic and combative abilities—a phenomenon that could also be observed during the French Revolution among the little lawyers of the Gironde. While others kept silent, while we ourselves hesitated and carefully considered what to do or not do on every occasion, he took determined action, and it will be to the lasting credit of Guilbeaux that he founded and edited the one intellectually important anti-war journal of the First World War, Demain, a document that should be read by everyone who really wants to understand the intellectual currents of that era. He gave us what we needed—a forum for international and supranational discussion in the midst of war. The support of Rolland was crucial in the significance of the journal, since thanks to his moral authority and his connections he could get Guilbeaux contributors of the highest calibre from Europe, America and India. On the other side, the revolutionaries still exiled from Russia, Lenin, Trotsky and Lunacharsky, trusted Guilbeaux’s radicalism, and they wrote for Demain regularly. For twelve or twenty months, as a result, there was no more interesting and independent journal anywhere in the world, and if it had survived the war it might perhaps have been crucial in influencing public opinion. Guilbeaux also undertook to speak up in Switzerland for those radical French groups whom Clemenceau’s firm hand had gagged. He played a historic part at the Socialist Congresses of Kienthal and Zimmerwald, where those who still thought internationally split away from those who had now switched to the patriotic line. No Frenchman, not even Captain Sadoul who had gone over to the Bolsheviks in Russia, was so feared during the war in the political and military circles of Paris as little, fair-haired Guilbeaux. At last the French secret service managed to trip him up. Blotting paper and copies of documents were stolen from a German agent’s hotel room in Berne. In fact all they proved was that German organisations had subscribed to a few copies of Demain—harmless enough in itself, since those copies had probably, in the painstaking German spirit, been ordered for various libraries and offices. But it was enough of a pretext in Paris for Guilbeaux to be described as an agitator in the pay of Germany, and a trial was held. He was condemned to death in his absence—entirely unjustly, as witness
the fact that the death sentence was quashed ten years later. But soon after that his vehemence and intransigence, which were beginning to endanger Rolland and the rest of us, brought him into conflict with the Swiss authorities. He was arrested and imprisoned. However, Lenin, who liked him personally and owed him a debt of gratitude for his help at a very difficult time, rescued him by turning him into a Russian citizen with a stroke of his pen and sending him to Moscow on the second sealed train. Now he could have developed his creative powers, for in Moscow, where he was credited with all the merits of a real revolutionary, including imprisonment and a death sentence passed in his absence, he had a second chance to do good work. Thanks to Lenin’s confidence in him, he might have done something positive to help the reconstruction of Russia, just as he might have done something positive in Geneva with Rolland’s help. And because of his brave stance in the war, few others seemed such an obvious choice to play a leading post-war part in France in parliament and in the eyes of the public. All the radical groups considered him a truly active and courageous man, a born leader. However, it turned out that there was nothing of the real leader about Guilbeaux. He was only, like so many wartime writers and revolutionary politicians, the product of a brief hour, and after a sudden rise to prominence these unbalanced characters always fall again. In Russia, as in the past in Paris, Guilbeaux the incorrigible polemicist squandered his gifts on futile quarrels, falling out even with people who had respected his courage, first Lenin, then Barbusse and Rolland, and finally all the rest of us. He ended in a small way, as he had begun, writing pamphlets of no great significance and unimportant polemics. He dropped out of the public eye, and died in Paris soon after his death sentence had been quashed. The boldest and bravest to oppose war during wartime, a man who, if he could have assessed the chance that the times offered him and exploited it properly, might have been one of the great figures of our epoch, he is now entirely forgotten, and I may be one of the last who still think gratefully of what he did in the war by publishing Demain.