CITIES OF PEACE AND WAR.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLI, Issue 9137, 9 February 1910, Page 7

CITIES OF PEACE AND WAR.

(By Robert Blatchford.)

You may get to Essen easily enough from Cologne 1 , if you wieh to get to Essen. I had no euch wieh, but 1 turned away from the route of my choice, and lost throe days because TL was told to do Essen, and Essen declined to bo done.

Cologne, as I have said, has smoke and chimneys, which, somehow, one reecrite. But Cologne is only on the fringo of smokeland. Dusseldorf is worse; Mulheim is worse etill. Dueecldorf is seen from the railway, with its forest of chimneys and its clouds of smoke, might be Leeds, or Burnley, or even Salford ; Mulheim, on a dull day, with a nip of cast in the wind, would pass for Sheffield.

"Well," I said to my companion, as we rode through this murky, ill-favoured country, "this is Lancashire." It is like Lancashire. It has all the marks of the industrial prosperity which hus made England what she- is, and now threatens to make Germany what she is not. Here wo have the blackened mill-shafts pointing their ominous and dirty lingers at the polluted eky. Hero we have monotonous ugliness and moanness in tho architecture of the factories and houses; the rows and rows of cottages built of naked brick; unclean in their nakedness; the flat, equare windows, unredeemed by cornice, balcony, or shutter; the deadly straight lines of blank slate roofs —quite English; and all the emoke and noise and dirt of the successful -north of England.

I They will not let. anybody go into the Krupp works. I was very glad. I do not. lovo machinery, nor emoke. nor noieo; and I can read the secret of Essen without crossing the North Sea. They are not making valentines in Eseen; they-are not printing poetry, nor propagating roses. The strenuous labour of that city of steam and iron bodes no good to the peace of the world. I can read the Krupp mystery without spectacles. It ie a mystery proper to hide, could it hut be hidden. ItGTHENBEKG. Then wo went on to Rothenberg. it is not easy to get to Rothenberg; but it is mucii harder to get out ot it. If you are anything of a poet you will be held up there like a floating blossom in a river eddy. If you are an artist the chances are that you will never break the epell at all 3 out will remain in the wonderful town, drawing ancient gates and bastions, or painting old-world fountains and hoary towers, and high-pitched red-tiled roofs and gables, with the glamour of the westering sun upon them. I met one English artist who has lived there for ten years, has bought a house there; means to stay there. Rothenberg cannot be described in words. There is no other place with which to compare it. It ie the most perfect mediaeval town in Europe. It ie a picture city, a dream city, a wonder city, a. city of the Never-Never-Land. It was built—unless some mediaeval poet dreamed it—many centuries ago, oupn tho green >slopes of the sleepy Tauber Valley. The Taubor itself winds below, like a silver thread among the vineyarde and orchards, and cornfields and gardens, with the fair hills melting into the blue distance beyond. High and sharp againet the pure eky stretch the roofs and towers, walls and bastions of Rothenberg; red, and white, and grey, and tawny, in a long ; line of beauty, like "many-towered Camelot."

The town is walled in, and all its walls and gates are still intact. The wiee women and men who dwell within those walle will suffer no modern vandalism, no twentieth-century vulgarity, to disfigure- tho mellowed glories of their beautiful old town. The railway station is a good way from the venerable gates. The people would not have it nearer. The beautiful old fountains stand just as time and the grand old sixteenth century artist left them. The tall, proud gables and the steep and high red roofe have never been defiled by the base hand of utilitarian restorers. When you pass the gates of Rothenberg you step into the Middle Ages. We went under the able guidance of the English artist through the wonderful streets and squares of this dream city. It ie the most pictureequo town I have ever seen. Every street ie a picture; every corner a surprise. There are oriel windows, old, old gates, decorated oaken doors, any one of which is fit to gazo at half a day and dream over all the night. Every building has its treasures of wrought iron, carven timber, cunningly wrought and fitted stone. Tho solid walls and 6trong, high towers have seen many siege*; the undulating, curving streets have run red with blood in many a cruel massacre.

THE DUNGEONS. Under the Rathaus, three flighte of eteps below the pavement, they show you a horrid dungeon where the Bismark of thirteenth century Rothenberg was starved to death. It ie a dreadful place, a stone cell without a glimmer of light, where the cold strikes like liquid ice to one's marrow. In the side of the wall may be seen a circular patch of tilo and mortar, where was built up again the subterranean tunnel cut by the poor prisoner's friende —too late. But there are no savages in Rothenberg to-day. Only a proud and honest race of solid Germans, fond of children, reverent of old monuments, loving flowers, and kind to the wild birds. Aβ we came away from the beautiful hoepital, where the young German doctor had shown Uβ the Rontgen rays appliances and all the wonders of modern surgery, a gentleman saluted my artist friend from the opposite side of the way. Ho was another German doctor. So we stood there in the sunshine, two Britons and two Germans, and heard the fountain ripple and saw the pretty children play, and I thought of the hundred smoking chimneys of Essen, where the devil's work goes on by night and day; and of tho secret councils where our lords and masters play "the high chess game whereof the pawne are men." And I looked at my good friend Pumpernickel, of Berlin, and remembered my good friend Uhlemann, with his cordial smile and kind blue eyes, and I said, "It's a beaetly old, mad, wicked I world. I am ashamed of oursclvee. Let us to the pleasant hotel of the Iron Hat and drink of the good Rhine wine." And we did even so, and as we raieed the cups to drink our pledge our friendly eyes were troubled. But is it not a. shameful and an inexplicable thing that men who love each other and desire peace may be plunged into war against their will by the insatiable wretches who play tho high chees game whereof the pawns are men? —Daily Mail.