A GREAT SHADOW.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XVIII, Issue 1896, 4 December 1923, Page 6

A GREAT SHADOW.

GERMANY’S BITTER ORDEAL. (By Sydney Loch, in the Sydney Sun.) Leipzig, Sept. 30. Not until the traveller through the Fatherland reaches the towns does lie get his first intimate sight of Germany in disaster. A year ago I took train across the breadth of Germany, entering from Belgium and leaving by Poland, and a few days ago I re-entered from Switzerland and travelled north. Both times the day was the same, a hot summer day—so hot that carriage windows were open and travellers had taken to their shirt-sleeves. The train drew me from morning to night through the noblest prospects—past meadows where cows chewed' the cud, past fields where a plentiful harvest was being taken in, by forests and tumbling rivers and slow canals, in view of mediaeval towns which had come straight from the pages of fairy stories, and neat villages joined to one another by broad white roads. The country seemed without end and the fairest in the world, and one kept repeating: “This is the German Fatherland. No wonder Germans fought so long for this. How peaceful! How perfect! What of damaged France and Belgium ? Is it fair that the victors should have suffered so and the vanquished be unhurt Then I got out of the train and visited three cities—first Berlin, then Dresden, and now Leipzig. I seem to have touched reality, another world from the world of the train. THE SAME POT OF JAM. Depression is terrible. The foreigner comes under this influence at once, and although Germany is a very cheap country for Briton or American, and the Germans themselves are friendly, yet it is impossible to enjoy a holiday. Shop windows are uninteresting, food is coarse and unattractive. The coffee is thin. Milk is doled out. The Germans are eating very little meat, and some of it 1 have sampled has the suspicious sweet taste of horseflesh. This is the holiday season, and the Germans are taking holiday like other people. They never enter the wayside inns, but buy the food in village shops for cheapness. And these same village shops hold nothing at all—perhaps one show cake of chocolate in the window; half a dozen bootlaces instead of a bunch. If you order lunch at an inn, they send out and buy the food. In Berlin there are first-class hotels patronised entirely by British and Americans, where food—and good food—is to be had; but in provincial towns without interest to tourists the caso is the reverse. A few days ago I dropped into a good hotel here in Leipzig, a large manufacturing town, and asked for jam. There was hesitation and a long delay while the jam was procured from elsewhere. 1 have returned here three or four times, and I am sure the jam I get is from the same pot of jam originally bought for me.

Many Germans have put their savings into dollars and sterling, and the stranges sight is to be seen of Germans wandering about with this money unable to exchange it for their own currency. Shopkeepers try to regulate prices on the dollar standard, and prices are usually changed twice a week. But the mark goes on leaping from day to day, from hour to hour, and shopkeepers cannot be equally agile with their prices. Thus an Englishman can buy the same pair of boots for a pound one day, five shillings the next, and fifteen shillings the next. Traders are being driven mad.

RING OF FINANCIERS. . Where has the wealth of the country gone? How difficult to answer—where is present wealth going? Political economy teaches that money is a convenience for the transference of real wealth from person to person; but itself is not wealth. The German harvest is good to look at. The pastures are full of cattle. The forests wave. The German nation is a nation of hardworkers. The German people is still a virile people. Then it must be true that a ring of. financiers, profiting by unusual conditions, are bleeding Germany white. They manipulate the mark, and the profits from cattle, from harvest, from forest, and from manufactured goods become theirs. Germany’s poverty is not staged to deceive the world, unless the German Government is playing a game which may plunge the Government into anarchy. Red flag processions march round German towns every day, and German discipline has so far declined that the police get out of the way. If Germany goes red, it will not take on the blood redness of Russia. The Teuton is not the Slav. But things may be very serious for Europe all the same.

HATRED OF FRANCE. What keeps the country from collapsing? The same thing which has brought it so neai* ruin. The German people stand together on the common rock of hatred of France. Posters denouncing the Ruhr occupation and telling the nation to stand firm are numcome a corresponding softening towards places of public interest notices state that Frenchmen and Belgians will not be admitted. France has bred an extravagant hate against herself. With the growth of this hate has erous. If shops and eating houses and Britain and America. Germany now turns to the old arch-enemy Britain for a crumb from the rich man’s table. Now she is on the ground—and she put herself there—she is rather inclined to whine. If Britain 'should break with France, Germany would give any help she could. At the moment there is no ray of light in the European dark. Britain and France build aeroplanes. France states that she must build a greater navy for purposes of security and peace. France and Poland bear the burdens of enormous armies. Germany is going red. What will the end be?