LIFE AMONG THE RUINS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17179, 24 October 1923, Page 6

LIFE AMONG THE RUINS.

THE DEBRIS OF THREE EMPIRES. THE REAL NEY/ EUROPE. In the old Russian and still shot-up town Viina there stands a tiny baroque church, so quaint and snug that even the Russians, who lopped off all Polish effigies from the churches, refrained from hurting it; while Napoleon, on his way back from Moscow, wanted to take it back with him to Paris. Napoleon had taste; the cathedralet is charming. As we stood upon its wee belfry tower my Polisli guide summed up: “Napoleon gone, Russians gone, Germans gone, Bolsheviks gone—in Poland everyone talks Polish.” The old fellow had struck it. Many armies have swept through Yilna before the Virgin shrine on whose citadel gateway every man has to walk bareheaded; only the works of man survive. Three empires have vanished, blown into the penumbra of history. In Poland everyone talks Polish. On the spot ons cannot resist philosophising. The giant, Russia, ostracised, divided, almost a. fungoid on the face of Europe, and next to her Germany, rudderless, soldierless, spiritless, homeless, at it were, she who but yesterday* was the epitome of majesty; lastly Austria, the geographical gangway of old Europe, and she passes idiotically out of the chronicle. UPROOTED FOUNDATIONS. Three empires, three emperors, three theocratic systems as old and gorgeous as tile Tower of London, have gone. No mere upheaval this, such as Napoleon directed. This time war has uprooted the foundations of wealth, of society, of rank and principle, upon which the status and governance of pre-war Europe rested. Europe emerges disthroned, dispossessed, disembowelled, not unlike France after the Bastille It is difficult to realise that Europe’s aristocracy has ceased to exist. Counts, vons, princes, grand dukes now belong to the fairy books; their palaces, castles, and princely abodes are in the auction market. To-day the only aristocrat is the artist. Europe is a democracy. An ex-count will accept a bob with glee, waiters refuse tips (some really do); the concept is the pace and pleasure of the mob. That is the real and epochal change. Napoleon transvalued, Armageddon disvalued all the seats of power. When we smile at the. League of Nations we must not forget that a Republican Europe is. the indispensable condition to anything in the shape of an United States or Europe. That condition exists. It is perhaps the one hopeful sign, and it may yet prove the only way out. THINGS LOST. Ail the same, this stupendous transformation jars. c AU Europe’s platformers have come down, all the pomp and meaning of the dim, glorious episcopal, and princely past. Wealth is the only title, before which all bow. Europe has been Massachusettsised, levelled flat, flenched. Only woman remains unaffected, impervious to change | or exchange, perhaps the sole ineluctI £bic law. | Ihe opera seems doomed. What is ; the opera without a foyer—what a I foyer without beauty? Can the ballet j flourish in republic? Or art in the vulgar circus of commercialism? Everything looks obsolete. Palaces, cathedrals,. monuments, all buildings save banks and shops, look and are useless and out of use. Petrograd is a deserted village. Berlin is returning to Provincialism, like a city under a spell. Potsdam has become the Hampstead Heath of tourist Germany. Warsaw is the Wellstadt of the East. Alone, poor Vienna, the deserted mistress of the West, still sheds some radiance of hard and feudal Arcady. This nerveless, stuttering, formless, drab, and headless Europe is palpably unfit for selfgovernment. and such is the danger of Europe as it struggles to its feet. So much has gone, vested in so little. Authority, efficiency, discipline, respect, dignity, faith, enthusiasm, beauty—such are the losses. It is too soon to estimate the gains, because all is still but a sprouting and sifting. Europe made safe for democracy is pretty unsafe for itself, anyhow, and the traveller feels he has lost his way, as amid the ruins of a woe-begone town. “ ORGANISED PANDEMONIUM.” The one positive is language, which is the new delirium. In business simplicity is the aim, but Versailles Europe is an organised pandemonium. Thus, Russians tear up the railway lines running from Poland; in Poland you cannot buy a railway ticket to Germany, or. vice versa, from Germany to Poland, iAt Kattowitz (Silesia) I wanted | ticket to Berlin. Impossible. At the ( information bureau I am told, at No. 5, at a certain hour, such things can be procured, but only with German marks. “What! No German money? No ticket! ” You won’t let me get Oermon money,” I shout. The Polish girl laughs. “ You can change," she says. “ The exchange, is closed,” I protest. “ To-morrow,” she snaps back, and shuts down the window. At last I buy German money at the. hotel and return. It is three minutes to the hour. The Polish girl is busy. As the clock strikes four she flings out one word: “Time!” Bang goes the. shutter. I cannot go. X did eventually succeed through diplomatic channels. Such is travelling to-day in democratic, Republican Europe. The peace of nations seems a long way from its League. Perhaps the Frenchman was right who told me that “ new Europe might learn French, seeing that the French certainly will not learn European.” EUROPE WITHOUT ITS DYNASTS. Shorn of symbols, Europe has no magis, no shrine, no inspiration. Prewar Europe belongs to the museum; post-war Europe is not yet outlined. A massive Philistinism reigns where once the Uohenzollerns, the lfapsburgs, and the Romanoffs ruled Europe across three sceptres. If you want a good bottle of wine you must get hold of the head waiter, tell him you are an intellectual —a British lord will serve—and you may be given something out of the “ reserve ” cellar; otherwise mere fluids is the result. I almost laughed when I saw my first decolletee women dining sedately in a Hamburg hotel (English), so grotesquely daring did this display of class appear. The t; smoking ” jacket has practically vanished. You meet a Pole in a train and offer him a “ Navy Cut ” fag, and he is delighted; on parting, he informs vou he was a prince. In restaurants you may be served by a young man about to take his doctor degree. You never know now. You only feel that something very old, indefinable, yet strangely fascinating, has gone out of the Continent, carrying with it standards. form, style, and structure; and the more you see of what has survived, what is thrusting up, what is levelling down all the time, the less a man cares to join the prophets. Europe without its dynasts a mintis which is still unsizeable. You are no longer jostled off the pavements by swaggering officers, except in the victor countries; you actually see the remaking of siyijlsgtjonx as a. Briton

— you feel extraordinary aristocratic, feudal, old, and Elizabethan, yet somehow hope seems the fitting note. The little cathedral at Vilna has outlived the systems that created it. After all, man is the key to his own evolution. The three Kaisers ruined themselves and their systems by virtue of their systems; they are already archaic. The new order may be orderless, but it will grow, though into what no one can tell. Europe is like a dismantled castle, though not yet-a spot to picnic in. The new’ incubation proceeds. Meanwhile the (sealsonal) map is the amateur soldier's paradise. Alas for Europe’s children !