By-Line Ernest Hemingway Page 7

  The Turk, he was a ragged, hungry-looking Turk farmer, fell out of the cart on to his face, picked himself up in terror and ran down the road like a rabbit. A Greek cavalryman saw him running, kicked spurs into his horse and rode the Turk down. Two Greek soldiers and the cavalryman picked him up, smashed him in the face a couple of times, he shouting at the top of his voice all the time, and he was led, bloody-faced and wild eyed, not understanding what it was all about, back to his cart and told to drive on. Nobody in the line of march had paid any attention to the incident.

  I walked five miles with the refugee procession along the road, dodging camels that swayed and grunted along, past flat wheeled ox carts piled high with bedding, mirrors, furniture, pigs tied flat, mothers huddled under blankets with their babies, old men and women leaning on the back of the buffalo carts and just keeping their feet moving, their eyes on the road and their heads sunken; ammunition mules, mules loaded with stacks of rifles, tied together like wheat sheaves, and an occasional battered Ford car with Greek staff officers, red eyes grubby from lack of sleep, and always the slow, rain soaked, shambling, trudging Thracian peasantry, plodding along in the rain, leaving their homes behind.

  When I had crossed the bridge over the Maritza, running a brick-red quarter mile wide flood, where yesterday had been a dry river bed covered with refugee carts, I turned off to the right and cut up side roads to Madame Marie’s to write a cable to The Star. All the wires were cut and I finally got an Italian colonel, who was returning to Constantinople with an Allied commission, to promise to file it for me at the telegraph office there the next day.

  The fever was going strong and Madame Marie brought me a bottle of sickly sweet Thracian wine to take my quinine with.

  “I won’t care when the Turks come,” Madame Marie said, sitting her great bulk down at the table and scratching her chin.

  “Why not?”

  “They’re all the same. The Greeks and Turks and the Bulgars. They’re all the same.” She accepted a glass of the wine. “I’ve seem them all. They’ve all had Karagatch.”

  “Who are the best?” I asked.

  “Nobody. They’re all the same. The Greek officers sleep here and then will come the Turk officers. Some day the Greek officers will come back again. They all pay me.” I filled up her glass.

  “But the poor people that are out there in the road.” I couldn’t get the horror of that twenty mile long procession out of my mind, and I had seen some dreadful things that day.

  “Oh well.” Madame Marie shrugged. “It is always that way with the people. Toujours la meme chose. The Turk has a proverb, you know. He has many good proverbs. ‘It is not only the fault of the axe but of the tree as well.’ That is his proverb.”

  That is his proverb all right.

  “I’m sorry about the lice, Monsieur.” Madame Marie had forgiven me under the influence of the bottle. “But what do you expect? This is not Paris.” She stood up, big and slovenly, and wise as people get wisdom in the Balkans. “Good-bye, Monsieur. Yes, I know 100 drachmas is too much for the bill. But I have the only hotel here. It is better than the street? Eh?”

  Mussolini: Biggest Bluff in Europe

  The Toronto Daily Star • JANUARY 27, 1923

  LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND.—In the Château de Ouchy, which is so ugly that it makes the Odd Fellows’ Hall of Petoskey, Michigan, look like the Parthenon, are held the sessions of the Lausanne Conference.

  Ouchy is pronounced Ooshy, not Ouchy, and about sixty years ago was a little fishing village of weather-stained houses, a white painted, pleasant inn with a shady front porch where Byron used to sit resting his bad leg on a chair while he looked out across the blue of Lake Geneva and waited for the supper bell to ring, and an old ruined tower that rose out of the reeds at the edge of the lake.

  The Swiss have torn down the fishing buildings, nailed up a tablet on the inn front porch, hustled Byron’s chair into a museum, filled in the reedy shore with dirt from the excavations for the enormous, empty hotels that cover the slope up the hill to Lausanne, and built the ugliest building in Europe around the old tower. This building, of pressed grey stone, resembles one of the love nests that sauerkraut kings used to build along the Rhine before the war as dream-homes for their sauerkraut queens and embodies all the worst phases of the iron-dog-on-the-lawn school of architecture. A steep hill runs up from the lake side to the town of Lausanne itself on the hill.

  You can tell when the conference is in session by the rows of limousines parked along the Château facing the lake. These limousines each bear the flag of their delegation. The Bulgarian and Russian flags are missing. Premier Stambuliski, of Bulgaria, bulks out of the swinging doors of the Chateau, looks suspiciously at the two helmeted Swiss policemen, scowls at the crowd and walks off up the hill to his hotel. Stambuliski cannot afford to ride in a limousine, even if he had the money. It would be reported to Sofia and his peasant government would demand an explanation. A few weeks ago he made an impassioned defense in the Bulgarian assembly to a charge by a group of his sheepskin-coated electors that he had been wearing silk socks, not getting up until 9 o’clock in the morning, drinking wine, and becoming corrupted by the slothful life of the city.

  The Russian delegation never know when they are going to be invited to the conference and when excluded and decided early, in one of their midnight family councils at the Hotel Savoy, that to keep a limousine all the time would be too expensive. A taxi comes up to the door and Arrens, the Cheka man and Bolshevist press agent, comes out, his heavy, dark facing sneering and his one roving eye shooting away out of control; he is followed by Rakovsky and Tchitcherin. Rakovsky, the Ukrainian, has the pale face, wonderfully modeled features, hawk-nosed and tight-lipped, of an old Florentine nobleman.

  Tchitcherin is not as he was at Genoa when he seemed to blink at the world as a man who has come out of darkness into too strong sunlight. He is more confident now, has a new overcoat, and a better groomed look, he has been living well in Berlin, and his face is fuller, although he looks the same as ever in profile with his wispy red beard and mustache and his furtive old clothes man slouch.

  Everyone wants to see Ismet Pasha but once they have seen him they have no desire to see him again. He is a little dark man, absolutely without magnetism, looking as small and uninteresting as a man can look. He looks more like an Armenian lace seller than a Turkish general. There is something mouselike about him. He seems to have a genius for being unrecognized. Mustapha Kemal has a face that no one can forget, and Ismet has a face no one can remember.

  I think the solution is that Ismet has a good movie face. I have seen him, in pictures, look stern, commanding, forceful and, in a way, handsome. Anyone who has seen in real life the weak, petulant face of any one of a dozen movie stars who look beautiful on the screen, knows what I mean. Ismet’s face is not weak or petulant, it is simply plain and characterless. I remember seeing Ismet in the first days of the conference come in to the Hotel Savoy as a crowd of newspaper correspondents were coming out from one of Tchitcherin’s famous “mass interviews.” Ismet, waiting for the lift, stood in the midst of this crowd of men who had been trying to get appointments to speak with him for days, and not one of them recognized him. He was too unobtrusive.

  It was too good to spoil, but I stepped up and greeted him.

  “It is very funny, this, Excellency,” I said as a couple of correspondents crowded him away from the door of the lift.

  He smiled like a school girl, shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands to his face in a mock gesture of shame. He giggled.

  “Get an appointment to come and talk with me,” he said, shook hands, stepped into the lift and grinned at me. The interview was over.

  When I did interview him we got along very well, as we both spoke such bad French. Ismet conceals his defective knowledge of French, which is a disgrace to an educated Turk, as in Turkey a knowledge of French is as much a social necessity as it is in Russia, by pretending to be deaf. He appreciates a joke, I
smet does, and he smiles delightedly to himself as he curls back in his chair and has the remarks of the great shouted into his ear in Turkish by his secretary.

  The next time I saw Ismet, after I had interviewed him, he was sitting at a table in a jazz dancing palace in Montreux smiling delightedly at the dancers, a pair of large, grey haired Turks sitting at his table with him and looking morosely on while he ate quantities of cakes, drank three cups of tea and made countless jokes in bad French with the waitress who brought the tea. The waitress seemed delighted with Ismet and Ismet with her, they were having a wonderful time. Not a soul in the place had recognized him.

  In contrast to Ismet there was Mussolini. Mussolini is the biggest bluff in Europe. If Mussolini would have me taken out and shot tomorrow morning I would still regard him as a bluff. The shooting would be a bluff. Get hold of a good photo of Signor Mussolini some time and study it. You will see the weakness in his mouth which forces him to scowl the famous Mussolini scowl that is imitated by every 19 year old Fascisto in Italy. Study his past record. Study the coalition that Fascismo is between capital and labor and consider the history of past coalitions. Study his genius for clothing small ideas in big words. Study his propensity for dueling. Really brave men do not have to fight duels, and many cowards duel constantly to make themselves believe they are brave. And then look at his black shirt and his white spats. There is something wrong, even histrionically, with a man who wears white spats with a black shirt.

  There is not space here to go into the question of Mussolini as a bluff or as a great and lasting force. Mussolini may last fifteen years or he may be overthrown next spring by Gabriele D’Annunzio, who hates him. But let me give two true pictures of Mussolini at Lausanne.

  The Fascist dictator had announced he would receive the press. Everybody came. We all crowded into the room. Mussolini sat at his desk reading a book. His face was contorted into the famous frown. He was registering Dictator. Being an ex-newspaper man himself he knew how many readers would be reached by the accounts the men in the room would write of the interview he was about to give. And he remained absorbed in his book. Mentally he was already reading the lines of the two thousand papers served by the two hundred correspondents. “As we entered the room the Black Shirt Dictator did not look up from the book he was reading, so intense was his concentration, etc.”

  I tip-toed over behind him to see what the book was he was reading with such avid interest. It was a French-English dictionary—held upside down.

  The other picture of Mussolini as Dictator was on the same day when a group of Italian women living in Lausanne came to the suite of rooms at the Beau Rivage Hotel to present him with a bouquet of roses. There were six women of the peasant class, wives of workmen living in Lausanne, and they stood outside the door waiting to do honor to Italy’s new national hero who was their hero. Mussolini came out of the door in his frock coat, his gray trousers and his white spats. One of the women stepped forward and commenced her speech. Mussolini scowled at her, sneered, let his big-whited African eyes roll over the other five women and went back into the room. The unattractive peasant women in their Sunday clothes were left holding their roses. Mussolini had registered Dictator.

  Half an hour later he met Clare Sheridan, who has smiled her way into many interviews, and had time for half an hour’s talk with her.

  Of course the newspaper correspondents of Napoleon’s time may have seen the same things in Napoleon, and the men who worked on the Giornale D’Italia in Caesar’s day may have found the same discrepancies in Julius, but after an intimate study of the subject there seems to be a good deal more of Bottomley, an enormous, war-like, duel fighting, successful Italian Horatio Bottomley, in Mussolini than there does of Napoleon.

  It isn’t really Bottomley though. Bottomley was a fool. Mussolini isn’t a fool and he is a great organizer. But it is a very dangerous thing to organize the patriotism of a nation if you are not sincere, especially when you work their patriotism to such a pitch that they offer to loan money to the government without interest. Once the Latin has sunk his money in a business he wants results and he is going to show Signor Mussolini that it is much easier to be the opposition to a government than to run the government yourself.

  A new opposition will rise, it is forming already, and it will be led by that old, bald-headed, perhaps a little insane but thoroughly sincere, divinely brave swashbuckler, Gabriele D’Annunzio.

  A Russian Toy Soldier

  The Toronto Daily Star • FEBRUARY 10, 1923

  LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND.—Georgi Tchitcherin comes from a noble Russian family. He has a wispy red beard and mustache, big eyes, a high forehead and walks with a slouch like an old clothes man. He has plump, cold hands that lie in yours like a dead man’s and he talks both English and French with the same accent in a hissing, grating whisper.

  Tchitcherin was an old Czarist diplomat and if Lenin is the Napoleon that made a dictatorship out of the Russian revolution, Tchitcherin is his Talleyrand. Their careers are both very similar. Both Tchitcherin and Talleyrand were diplomats under the monarchy that preceded their revolution, both were sent abroad as ambassadors under the revolution, both were refused by the countries they were sent to, both were in exile and both became the director of foreign affairs of the dictatorship that followed their revolution.

  “We came to Lausanne with one program,” Tchitcherin said to me one afternoon. “And we will leave it with the same program. The straits, both the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, must be closed to warships.”

  He spoke with the tired intensity of a man who is saying a thing for the hundredth time, who believes it and is as impassioned about it as the first time, but has become wearied from not being understood.

  “As long as the straits are open to warships,” he went on, “Russia is at the mercy of any nation that sends a fleet into the Black Sea. We can have no safety, no freedom to develop, no security from invasion as long as battleships and dreadnoughts can enter the Black Sea. There is only one thing for Russia to do if warships are allowed to enter, and that is to arm. She must build battleships in order to have a great fleet in the Black Sea. That means the crippling of her productive power by diverting it to build a great navy. But she must do it.”

  “How about naval disarmament?” I asked.

  “Russia was not invited to the Washington conference,” Tchitcherin shrugged his shoulders. “And what has come of that conference? How near are we to naval disarmament now? We are dealing with facts, with conditions as they exist. Russia would be the first to accept an invitation to a naval disarmament conference, but until we have complete naval disarmament, we can only keep warships out of the Black Sea in one way. That way is to have the straits closed to all warships and fortified by the Turks so they can enforce the closing.”

  Tchitcherin was on his best ground now. He is an old Russian diplomat and he is soundest when he is fighting for the national aims of Russia. He sees that the problems of Soviet Russia, the territorial and national problems, are the same as they were under the Russian Empire. The world revolution did not come off and Russia faces the same problems she always faced. Tchitcherin knows those problems. He knows the rivalry between Russia and Great Britain in the east and he knows that as long as Russia is a nation, no matter who governs, and as long as there is a British Empire, their interests will conflict. Now he is trying to gain by treaties advantages and securities that later would have to be gained or lost by wars.

  Tchitcherin knows that a Russian invasion of India through Afghanistan would be impossible as long as the Crimea was open to a counter invasion by the British Fleet. Lord Curzon knows that too. Tchitcherin knows that the Black Sea coast is the great thousand-mile Achilles tendon of Russia. Lord Curzon knows that too.

  It was this daily, bitter struggle between the British Empire and the future Russian empire with Curzon, a tall, cold, icicle of a man holding the whip hand with the British fleet, and Tchitcherin fighting, fighting, with arguments, historical i
nstances, facts, statistics and impassioned pleas and finally, seeing it was hopeless, simply talking for history, registering his objections for future generations to read, that made the Lausanne conference so interesting. It is this same unreconcilable difference between Russia and Great Britain that will run like a crack through any Near East treaty that is made in Lausanne and keep it from having permanence.

  With his cold hands and his cold brain and his red wispy beard, his inhuman capacity for work, his dislike and distrust of women, his indifference to publicity, public opinion, money or anything except his work and Russia, Tchitcherin looked like a man without a weakness. Then came the pictures that accompany this article.

  Tchitcherin, you must know, has never been a soldier. He is timid, personally. He does not fear assassination, but he would turn pale if you shook your fist under his nose. Until he was twelve years old his mother kept him in dresses. He is all brain and he simply feeds his body because it is a supporting part of his brain.

  Several of us knew all this about him. Then one Sunday morning as the churches were emptying in Lausanne and the mountain goers were hiking down the streets with their skis and packs, to catch the train to Aigle or the Diablerets, a group of correspondents stopped in front of a photographer’s window. It was displaying the photographs you see here.

  “They’re faked,” one man said. “Why he’s never had a uniform on in his life.”

  We all looked closely at the photographs.

  “Nope. They’re not faked.” Some one said: “I can tell. They’re not faked. Let’s go and ask Slocombe.”

  We found George Slocombe, the correspondent of the London Daily Herald who is Tchitcherin’s very good friend and sometimes his mouthpiece. George was sitting in the press room of the Lausanne Palace Hotel, his big black sombrero back on his head, his curling red beard sticking out at an angle, his pipe in his mouth.