I came across this short article by Eugene V. Debs. It was written in 1915 but much of it, including the peace in the USA and war in Europe, is still very timely. I sometimes feel tired of saying that when going through historical records, especially since it only seems to apply to bad things, disease, poverty, war, corruption, bigotry etc.
Debs was at the time the leader of the Socialist Party and was its pick for Presidential candidate, his opposition to American entry in the First World War and refusal to buckle to pressure led to his arrest, and he ran his last Presidential campaign from behind bars.
Published in St. Louis Labor, whole no. 578 (Aug. 14, 1915),
Because the workers have everything to lose, including their lives, and absolutely nothing to gain in war, it does not follow under the benevolent rule of capitalism that they have everything to gain and nothing to lose in peace. In Europe just now the workers have war and hell while in this country they are enjoying peace and starvation. That there may be no mistake about the latter condition I quote from the highest capitalistic authority, the Associated Press, which carries the following dispatch:
COLUMBUS, Ohio, July 26th, 1915.— Reports received here today from militia officers who have charge of the distribution of food supplies among destitute families in the Southern Ohio coal mining districts, prompted state officials to send out additional appeals for contributions to aid in the relief work.
The reports showed that a large number of these 10,000 families in the Hocking and Sunday Creek Valleys are dependent on outside aid for food. In describing conditions the word “piti- able” appeared frequently in the reports. There is no strike in these districts, but most of the miners are out of work owing to the shutting down of the mines.
There is much more to the dispatch, but this is enough. There is no war in this country and there is no strike in Ohio. Instead of war and hell such as they have in Europe they have peace and starvation in Ohio. The soldiers who are asphyxiated in the trenches have one advantage in war over their fellow-workers who are starving in the mining camps in peace — their agony is reduced to hours, perhaps minutes, instead of being prolonged into a lifetime. Blessed are they who are speedily reduced to wormfood, for they shall not see their offspring starve in the midst of plenty.
• • • • • It is not the misfortune of the miners that condemns them to see their wives and children starving before their eyes in a state bursting with riches they themselves produced; it is their folly and crime in common with the folly and crime of the people among whom they live.
The men who shut down the mines and locked out the miners and are now starving them and their families are not among those crying for relief. They own the mines and control the jobs and can shut out and starve the miners at will — by grace of the miners them- selves, an overwhelming majority of whom belong to the same capi- talist party their masters do and cast their votes with scrupulous fidel- ity to perpetuate the boss ownership of the mine in which they work and their own exclusion and starvation at their master’s will.
Blessed be the private ownership of the mines, for without it the miners and their wives would lose their individuality, their homes would be broken up, their morality destroyed, their religion wiped out, and they would be denied forever the comfort and solace of pov- erty and starvation!
When the miners themselves control the mines, once they have learned how to control themselves, they will not lock themselves out and starve themselves and their loved ones to death. The bosses are very kindly doing this for them, but only because the miners them- selves, by their votes and otherwise, have willed it. The bosses lose their power and along with it their jobs when the workers find theirs.
• • • • •
But I only meant to show that in peace as in war the workers are the losers; if they are not killed in war they are starved in peace; if they escape the trenches they are reserved for the slave pits. The bosses are always the beneficiaries; the workers always the victims. The Rockefellers never lose and the [John R.] Lawsons never win. Such is capitalism and the workers who side with the bosses and support capitalism politically and otherwise, and are therefore respon- sible for capitalism, are also responsible for the hell they get in war and the starvation they suffer in peace.
Netflix released another film adaptation of Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front. I don't really like the movie, of the three versions I've seen I think this is the one I'd put at the bottom of the list. It reminded me of the 1930 version, which then reminded me of that version's ill fated sequel that came out in 1937, The Road Back.
The Road Back is a loose version of Remarque's sequel novel of the same name. After learning about it I was intrigued I enjoyed reading All Quiet on the Western Front and liked both film versions, and this time the action is set during the German Revolution. And it was directed by James Whale, whose directorial debut was the British WWI film Journey's End, and he had directed Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Old Dark House, Bride of Frankenstein etc. So, this is a rare film. Its also notorious as an early example of Hollywood being more than willing to wreck a movie for a chance to score big in a international market, when its studio Universal tried to create an alternative version for the foreign market. That was a problem, because of the market trends in the 1930s the largest foreign consumer of Hollywood movies was Germany. And the movie was released in 1937, which meant that this film had to appease the film board set up by Joseph Goebbels.
This is why the film is barely known outside of film history trivia. As far as I can tell The Road Back never received a home release, though curiously I did find a copyright renewal for the movie in 1965, and copies of the film do show up online on occasion though are also often pulled by takedown request. Also curious for a 1937 film print the copy I saw was in pretty good shape, considering, I've seen worse conditions of films that are readily available.
Above is a copy I managed to find online right now, I'd recommend ripping it if you want to keep it, just to be save.
Here is the time when I would like to say The Road Back is a lost classic, but honestly aside from novelty I don't think its very good. I suppose its the most substantial treatment of the German Revolution by an English language movie. Granted most of what it has to say about the revolution are jokes about how strange it is that German's with their rigid conformity and worship of procedure are trying to overthrow the established order. The Road Back is a comedy, though its an uneven one, some scenes are supposed to be dramatic and say something of importance but then the next scene will have a couple actors bumble through a comedy routine and it doesn't handle the transitions between them very well. The ending courtroom scene with its appeal for sympathy for traumatised survivors of the war and the raw disgust shown to a character whose a rich boy and son of a war profiteer should fit perfectly into a film like this, but they stick out like sore thumbs.
And the revolution subplot doesn't really go anywhere conclusive. Most of the scenes involving it are comic, but then you have a small number of scenes involving street clashes and police firing on and killing civilians. One occasion the scene shifts from a joke about the revolution to having civilians shot dead by police with machine guns seconds after jokes were cracked at how silly this is. And then it just stops completely.
While its depiction was very strange I did like some of the jokes in the revolution scenes, especially the part when the townspeople march on the Mayor and make him host a mass meeting. Its revealed that they do this every single night and make him host a meeting while he complains that he's old and needs to sleep. But most of the other comedy fell flat to me. Especially that provided by Willy played by Andy Devine. He has a braying voice and he sulks through all of his lines. The dialogue is also pretty poor, a lot of what he has to say seems to be on paper to be combative and cocky, but it comes across as whiny.
Its a bizarre and uneven movie, though this seems to be down to the panic by the studio over its potential loss of investment in Germany they re-edited the film and shot new material to limit the offense caused to the German authorities. It didn't work. Which isn't remotely surprising to me. This was a film based on a book that was banned in Germany by a writer who was denounced as an enemy for his antimilitarist writing. Furthermore it depicts the German revolution, a period that was dominated by the Nazi party's domestic political enemies, Social Democrats, Anarchists, Communists etc. And to cap it off many of the actors demonstrate shell shock and the film is one of the earliest explorations of soldiers Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The finished film does undermine and weaken much of the theme's of the story, but they are still present, and of course its still attached to Remarque. It was simply doomed from the outset.
To give a flavour of how impossible appealing to the German cinema authorities was, here's a news clipping from the time.
“The movie, Typhon, based on the comedy by the Hungarian writer Lendengyel, has been banned in Germany. The censorship board justifies this decision by pointing out that in the movie the person whose behaviour is exemplary is Japanese. The white people all behave rather badly. The Japanese, with whom the heroine strikes up a friendship, is an impeccable gentleman. Moreover the movie shows French people and in fact does not deal with Germans. In short, this work is regarded as, by omission, an insult to the Aryan race, whose superiority is not even mentioned.”
As an added insult, the meddling over the film soured James Whale on directing, he had high expectations for the movie and fought the studio over its cuts and re-shoots. He didn't quit directing immediately after The Road Back but his career did wind down and end a few years later in 1941.
Taking all this on board it isn't really a surprise the film has languished in the shadows. I get the embarrassment but the refusal to release the film at all and to swipe at bootleg copies nearly a hundred years later speak to some real hostility. I don't believe it'll ever escape the trivia or be held up as a classic, but I think it deserves to be shown and seen.
Hello and thank you for downloading Witness from the BBC
World Service with me Alex Last. And as part of our centenary series on the
First World War, using archived recordings we go back to the spring of 1917
when the French army was rocked by mutiny.
Edward Spears:
The thing that astonishes me is that the French army didn’t
mutiny a long time before 1917. They had had absolutely appalling losses, due
largely you know to mistakes and to mistaken theories.
Alex Last:
General Edward Louis Spears was in 1917 the head of the
British military mission to the French Government.
Edward Spears:
At the beginning of the war in August 1914 I myself had seen
the French army attacking German positions and machine guns with bands playing
and officers in white gloves leading them in. they went on suffering terrible
losses, still they endured displaying qualities of stoicism and staying power
which we really thought only we were capable of.
Alex Last:
By April 1917 one million French troops had been killed, even
more had been wounded, all in less than three years of war. Most had fought and
died in seemingly hopeless battles of attrition on the western front, and even
if they survived the big offensives, life in the trenches could be truly grim.
The British realising this would rotate men in and out of
the front lines every few days, the French did not. Troops stayed in the
morass, rest was short, leave often cancelled. On April the 16th
1917 the French commander General Nivelle launched yet another massive
offensive. In a message to his troops he boasted he knew the formula for victory
and wrote to them of the need for sacrifice.
Louis Barthas:
The reading of this patriotic drivel aroused no enthusiasm
at all.
Alex Last:
Louis Barthas kept a private account of life as an ordinary
French soldier.
Louis Barthas:
It only served to demoralise the soldier who heard in it
only a terrible menace, more suffering, great danger, a frightful death, a
useless sacrifice totally in vain. No one had any confidence in this new round
of killing leading to any useful result.
Alex Last:
One of the offensives principal targets was a ridge called
Le Chemin de Dames, the French attack went wrong from the start.
Pierre Gaultier:
The plan of the French attack has been betrayed to the
Germans. He knew exactly the date, even the hour of the French attack. The whistle
went and we attacked, I was in the second line, in the few minutes after the
attack was launched, the two battalions they had been wiped out.
Alex Last:
Pierre Gaultier was a sergeant in the French army.
Pierre Gaultier:
So our attack was stopped, was hopeless, put ourselves in
shell holes or made little holes to put ourselves in so that the machine guns
couldn’t hit us. We stayed there for the rest of the day could only recover to
our lines at night.
Alex Last:
90,000 French troops were killed or wounded in the first day
but Nivelle did not call a halt. A popular song emerged among the French troops
of the time the words said it all.
[French recording of
the song La Chanson de Craonne]
Its in Craonne up on
the plateau we’re leaving our skins,
Because we’ve all
been sentenced to die,
We’re the ones that they’re
sacrificing,
Louis Edwards:
The weariness, the hopelessness of the prospect of the war
seemed utterly dreadful. Furthermore there were these rumours of the Russian
Revolution and things weren’t looking at all good.
Alex Last:
In early May, elements of a French division refused the
order to attack, mutinies soon spread.
Louis Barthas:
A wind of revolt blew across almost all the regiments. There
were plenty of reasons for discontent, the painful failure of the Chemin de
Dames offensive, which had no result other than a dreadful slaughter. The prospect
of more long months of war, ahead with a highly dubious outcome, and finally
the long wait for home leave.
It is that which bothered the soldiers most I believe.
Alex Last:
Louis Barthas’s regiment was one of those that mutinied.
Louis Barthas:
At noon on May the 30th there was even a meeting
outside the village to form a Russian style Soviet composed of three men from
each company to take control of the regiment. To my amazement, they offered me
the presidency of the soviet; that is to say to replace the Colonel no less.
Imagine me, an obscure peasant commander of the 296th
regiment. I refused as I had no wish to be tied to an execution post.
Alex Last:
Incredibly the French managed to keep the mutiny a secret
from both friend and foe.
Louis Edwards:
It did seem astonishing that we had 60 highly qualified
officers attached to the French headquarters, and over a period of weeks the
French had managed to conceal any trouble from them. In a way perhaps it was fortunate,
because the Germans hadn’t heard either, if the Germans had then the war would
have been over.
Alex Last:
General Spears was one of very few outside the French army
to hear about the mutinies. He went to investigate himself.
Edward Spears:
I found that there were only two divisions of the whole
French army that could be relied upon, between the front line and Paris. And I arrived
in part of the country near Soissons which I knew very well and there I was met
with the most amazing sight. Regiment after regiment was in open mutiny.
There were degrees of mutiny, in many units all the men wore
red rosettes, the officers were confined to a section of the village, had no
authority at all. And the men had established posts, I wasn’t in the least
molested, I asked what was going on? And got rather evasive answers, but in the
main found that the line taken by the men was that they were prepared to occupy
the line, but they weren’t prepared to fight. After what had happened, after
the bloodbath they’d been submitted to after all, one could understand their
point of view.
Alex Last:
Faced with mutinies on such a large scale the French army –
both officers and men- wrestled with how to react. Caught in the middle
sergeant Gaultier was ordered to lead a few men to halt a huge crowd of
mutinous soldiers from another regiment.
Pierrre Gaultier:
Before we got to the crowd my men told me “we’ll follow you
anywhere. But we shan’t go with bayonets on against French troops”. I looked at
the crowd, they were unarmed. One of them had a frying pan in one hand and a
poker in the other and was hitting it as hard as possible and he told me “come
on boys, we’ll go to Paris and throw grenades in the Palais Bourbon”.
So, I told him he may do whatever he likes but we weren’t of
that opinion, we had nothing to do we started talking, there were thousands
they were upset but they had nothing ferocious about them. But in the meantime
some machine guns had already been put in position. And they went back to their
quarters and the next day rains of lorries came and took them somewhere, I
never heard of them again.
Alex Last:
Amid the crisis General Nivelle was removed, General Petain
took over and promised to improve conditions. Through force and deception the
most rebellious units were separated and purged. Thousands were arrested
hundreds sentenced to death, though only around 50 were actually executed. And in
time the mutinies petered out, units were returned to the line.
Louis Barthas:
We gathered to start off for the trenches, noisy
demonstrations took place. Shouting, singing, whistling, screaming and of
course the singing of the International. If the officers had made a gesture or
sad a word against this noise I sincerely believe they would have been
ruthlessly massacred, so high was the tension.
They took the most sensible course, waiting patiently until
calm was restored, you cannot shout, whistle and scream forever. And there was
no leader among the rebels capable of making a decision or of giving us
direction. So we ended up heading towards the trenches although not without
grumbling or griping.
Alex Last:
For the French army after the mutinies for a time the notion
of launching huge offensives was over. It adopted a more defensive policy to
reduce the loss of life, but the sacrifices of the French soldier were to continue
for another year, by which time almost one and a half million were dead, more
than four million wounded. Losses that would profoundly shape France for
decades.
But perhaps given the scale of the slaughter on all sides
what’s remarkable was not that there was a mutiny but rather that it was so
rare.
Louis Edwards:
Who can blame the men who had suffered so much for not believing
that the struggle wasn’t hopeless? Who could blame for having lost faith in
their leadership?
Hello and welcome to the Witness podcast from the BBC World
Service with me Alex Last. And today using recordings from the BCC archive we
go back 100 years to November 1918, when in the final weeks of World War One Germany
was on the point of collapse and facing revolution.
Archival Witness One:
The whole life of the country was becoming grimmer, it was
getting very difficult. The war was lasting too long and Germany didn’t have
much chance of winning it because conditions within the country were getting so
very difficult and there was a general feeling that the war as a whole had to
stop. This feeling was spreading very fast among the civilian population and I
saw that the war would have to end soon. That was the feeling shared by most of
the soldiers I met in those days, they were fed up with the whole thing and
they wanted to go home badly.
Alex Last:
After four years of war by late 1918 the situation in
Germany was desperate. First there was the human cost, two million German
soldiers were dead, four million had been wounded. Germany’s armies were in
retreat, its main allies were defeated or on the point of collapse. But on the
home front too civilians had been struggling. Years of a British naval blockade
on Germany had created shortages and hunger.
Archival Witness Two (Hertha Hasse):
Of course the food situation got worse and worse, which got
on everybody’s nerves.
Alex Last:
Hertha Hasse lived in Frankfurt.
Hertha Hasse:
Our diet consisted mainly of turnips one day and barley and
prunes the next and then it started again. And people got more and more
undernourished, and my mother gave everything possible to the children.
Those people who really had no connections and didn’t get
anything else were in a deplorable state of nutrition.
Alex Last:
Alarmingly for the German government discipline within the
armed forces was fraying.
Archival Witness three (Heinrich Boytoff):
In 1918 when I became a soldier myself I think discipline
was getting rather slack.
Alex Last:
Heinrich Boytoff was the son of a German officer.
Heinrich Boytoff:
You could see it on the streets of the garrison town, when
soldiers coming from the front didn’t take the pains of saluting officers
anymore. They thought the officers in the garrison had a very good time so why
should they salute them? That was considering the discipline in the Prussian
army a very great change. And it showed that something was breaking, for
instance my commanding officer was so afraid of a coming revolution that he made
me sleep with a gun in my arm in front of his rooms in the night.
I had to do that, perhaps this experience shows that the
German army behind the front was in those days, let’s say September, October,
November not quite intact anymore. And the average soldier, a lot of them I
think had the feeling that the war was lost already then.
Alex Last:
They were not alone; in September 1918 the German High
Command told the German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm that the war was indeed lost.
Germany began to make peace overtures but the Allies wanted total capitulation.
The German military’s top brass had effectively ruled the country during the
war but now defeat was inevitable they wanted to abdicate responsibility for
the catastrophe. So in the final weeks of the war there was constitutional
reform, a move towards parliamentary democracy. For the first time leaders of
the left-wing Social Democrats the country’s largest political party were
invited to into government, but events on the ground were moving fast.
There were strikes by workers and in Kiel sailors of the
German Navy mutinied demanding peace.
Naval Officer Edgar Luktin was in the city.
Archival Witness Four (Edgar Luktin):
The first signs of what was coming appeared in Kiel, there
was some shooting, in the morning of the 5th of November I saw the
Red Flag on board of my boat. First shock, the general feeling was of course,
well now it’s definitely over and that was the feeling of the Kiel population
too. They were certainly mostly interested in coming to and with this lost war
because then they could hope they would get food again. They were more or less
starving since quite a considerable time.
Alex Last:
And form Kiel protests escalated across Germany, left-wing
workers and soldiers councils were set up in major cities, there were calls for
peace and democratisation, the creation of a socialist state, some wanted to go
further. Germany was facing a revolution.
In response peace efforts were stepped up and on the 9th
of November the Kaiser himself was forced to abdicate and in Berlin Germany was
declared a Republic. And the leaders of the Social Democratic party took charge
of the government, trying to stabilise the situation.
Archival Witness four (Baron von Rheinbarben):
When I arrived in the Foreign Office on the morning of the 9th
of November there were certain groups in the streets and unrest everywhere. But
we didn’t know the real truth that the Kaiser had left for Holland and that the
German government had broken down.
Alex Last:
Baron von Rheinbarben was a German diplomat.
Baron von Rheinbarben:
There was no more government to decide what should happen.
Only one man perhaps and that was Ebert the chief of the Social Democrat Party.
He remained in office but we heard that Schiedemann another Social Democrat had
declared a German Republic from the window of the Reichstag.
Archival Witness five (Eva Reichman):
The atmosphere was heavy with rumours.
Alex Last:
Eva Reichman lived in Berlin.
Eva Reichman:
Then suddenly I remember near the Opera House a red motor
car chased through Unter den Linden, a motor car with a red flag with soldiers
and machine gun in front. The others followed, a few shots were heard in the
distance. The streets filed with little discussion groups bearing banners or
shouting `Long live the Republic! Long live the Socialist Revolution!`
Archival Witness six:
There were thousands and thousands of people, there was a
mob. They cried that they wanted the communists as new rulers. And I saw
officers still in uniform and I saw the mob taking away the epaulettes of those
officers. It was terrible.
Archival Witness seven:
Then suddenly the news sellers turned up with new special
editions, the Kaiser and the Crown Prince had abdicated. At that moment, it was
a moment of extreme excitement, the idea of monarchy or no monarchy didn’t
matter to me in the least, my only idea was that now the Armistice was
attained.
Alex Last:
And within days the war would be over, though the political
chaos in Germany would not. For peace Germany would have to accept harsh terms
but its military and political leaders knew that fighting on was not an option.
The German army was defeated and exhausted; the public would not countenance
futile slaughter. And yet for soldiers like Hartwig Pohlmann the deafeat was
still very hard to take.
Archival Witness eight(Hartwig Pohlmann):
We of course knew that the bitter end was near, our
Armistice delegation had crossed the lines near La Capelle on November the 8th.
Two days later HQ orders told us that the Armistice will be concluded without
delay. The Emperor, the Crown Prince and all the Federal Princes had resigned.
That same day the new German Republican government of Ebert,
Schiedemann and Haase asked our supreme Headquarters to make sure that we
soldiers should uphold discipline. Then we received on November the 11th
the order `As from twelve noon the guns are silent, the war is over`. How we
had imagined and longed for that very moment, but now Germany had capitulated,
and in our state of despair the retreat began.
Tyranny must be opposed at the start. Autocracy, once secured in the saddle, is difficult to dislodge. If you believe that America is entering the war "to make democracy safe," then be a man and volunteer.
But if you know anything at all, then you should know that the cry of democracy is a lie and a snare for the unthinking. You should know that a republic is not synonymous with democracy, and that America has never been a real democracy, but that it is the vilest plutocracy on the face of the globe.
If you can see, hear, feel, and think, you should know that King Dollar rules the United States, and that the workers are robbed and exploited in this country to the heart's content of the masters.
If you are not deaf, dumb, and blind, then you know that the American bourgeois democracy and capitalistic civilization are the worst enemies of labor and progress, and that instead of protecting them, you should help to fight to destroy them.
If you know this, you must also know that the workers of America have no enemy in the toilers of other countries. Indeed, the workers of Germany suffer as much from their exploiters and rulers as do the masses of America.
You should know that the interests of Labor are identical in all countries. Their cause is international.
Then why should they slaughter each other?
The workers of Germany have been misled by their rulers into donning the uniform and turning murders. So have the workers of France, of Italy, and England been misled. But why should *you*, men of America, allow yourselves to be misled into murder or into being murdered?
If your blood must be shed, let it be in defense of your own interests, in the war of the workers against their despoilers, in the cause of real liberty and independence.
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