THE CHINA MAIL, MARCH-2, 1937
Amid the Marching of Armies Millions of People Cling to the Ways They Have always Known
Life
Goes
On
In Europe
“UROPE in violent turmoil" is low; the slogan glorifies II Duce, processes of a government become, rium.
* ** *
And there sits a Brown fierce as he
"Esme tal vintage familiar to for her slogan as ruce, of ow become, Shirt, not there. most people who read newspapers. hurrying on to his destiny and dramatic its gestures and postures seems in the dispatches, nibbling But scarcely one European în a backward into history.
and outcries, government largely at a bit of pastry held up to his hundred is so acutely aware of this
remains mere bubble and froth lips by the fingers of his girl, while So all is not saluting and heiling floating above the genuine life of a Nazi officer at the wheel of a "violent turmoil" as is the average and counter-marching nor oratory the people beneath it-unless it be tiny roadster with the top down, a reader in the Far East War in
from balconies, much Europe looms bigger in Hong Kong
as it may their government, with its root in vivid blonde at his side, roars past conversations, when Europe is dis- seem so to the headline-hunter of their will and their content. Other the cafe at a speed which must be cussed at all, than it does in contemporary history, nor is it all wise the people are an audience at slightly illegal for this crowded
defiance and chest-thumping and Europe.
a performance by a magician, in-street. perfervid patriotism and cheers, nocent bystanders at a riot, non- Like alcohol, headlines are a dis- much as the dictators might like to combatants in a theatre of war.
Everywhere new apartment buildings are rising, as they do in tillation, toxic and heads; and pre- have it so. People in Berlin and Mos-
Maida Vale and the Bronx, but hail- cisely as alcohol distilled from po- cow are riding back and forth in
ed as magnificent achievements of tatoes does not taste like a potato, subways, as they are in London and
Early on a Sunday evening the Stalin or Hitler or Mussolini: They just so do the headlines taste not Paris, girls with an intellectual precisely like to-day's European aura absorbed in novels and elder- Champs Elysees is crowded with contain kitchenettes and balconies
promenaders.
At every intersec- and plenty of closet space, and into ly men dozing off for a few min-
tion from the Rond Point to the them are moving young men and utes; and people are clinging to Behind the seven veils of diplom- straps in trams and buses, and Arc de Triomphe, lurking in the women concerned, as in the Bronx. acy, life on the Continent con- warily puffing at cigarettes under
shadows of the side streets and about lamps and beds and chairs, tinues amid the daily crises to flow signs that forbid smoking.
spilling over into the brilliantly, young people who think about them- lighted boulevard, are blue-cloaked selves sixteen hours a day, and strongly in its praiseworthy com- monplace channels. There persist Children are rolling hoops in the Gardes Mobile, some with pistols about the government and state- to an amazing degree serenity and Luxembourg Gardens, and their and sabres, others with rifles. Oc- craft perhaps an hour a week, or sanity and orderly living.
nurses are sitting and knitting or casionally a column of horsemen in oftener when it is called to their running after them or flirting with patent-leather helmets jogs past. attention. the handsome gendarmes. In a There must be 2,000 armed troops barren Moscow square,
life
Crowds are coming and going at
all hours. Soon after dawn an
*
*
small in a half or three-quarters of a At a Swiss hotel a German family elderly Englishman bent on keep Russians are twittering at a Punch mile, with several thousand others is hugely enjoying a holiday. After ing fit is scutting or the lake in and Judy show, and in a factory a in reserve
near by.
But to the a colossal dinner it is gathered Regent. Park, with the swans gaz workman who is saving his roubles Sunday evening promenaders they around the radio in the radio- ing at him in mild astonishment to buy a new bicycle is turning out are as incidental as a passing am listening room, and a speech by Toward noon the crowds are so roller bearings for the mechanized bulance or fire truck.
Herr Goebbels is throbbing across thick on Amsterdam's fashionable.
Pegasus which will carry all the shopping street that they overflow
The women pull their husbands the frontiers The German father Russians toward Utopia, if you be into the narrow roadway and oust lieve what you read in the Moscow over toward the brilliant shop win- glances quickly about him and the vehicles. At dusk a group of
papers; but he is much like a roll dows which are transforming and turns. German gentle-folk gallop - along:
avenue, as women are pulling their ham, for all that Charlottenburg. From a Russian
husbands over to shop windows on plane one sees a small child near Everywhere politics is a lively Fifth Avenue and Bond Street and ticism is rife in Welikije Luki teasing a flock of topic of conversation, but not the the Corso Humberto in Rome, to A young Russian tame geese. At 10 o'clock the com- only one, and often not the domin- gaze at fashionable frocks, and, on John Reed's book, fortable Esthonians are already gathered at the cafes for their mid- morning coffee.
Viennese displaces Herr Goebbels's
ones.
the bridlepath between Berlin and e-bearing craftsman in Birming cheapening this end of the great walt dial until ca
Danzig is a storm centre,
but
its surrounding fields are tenderly
Across the avenue from the Opera
By Harlan Miller
Mental processes go on, am
confides that Ten Days That Shook the World, banned in Leningrad and alf Russia because it says too little of Stalin and too much of Trotsky. But, he adds with a wink, he has read the book and so have quite a few other young Russians.
cultivated and green, and there are ant one. Those two young men Oulitza Gorkovo in Moscow, at
On the stage at the Moscow the little white sailboats whipping poring over a sheaf of papers in frocks not quite so fashionable but Opera a magnificent revolutionary back and forth past the pleasure the far corner of the Cafe du Dome much more expensive.
ballet is in progress. It is called pier. Sunday morning is serene in Cologne, and the burghers are win are they plotting a coup against
"The Flames of Paris,” and But the the government? No; they are But the Red Square is deserted through a maze of superb dancing dow shopping and exercising their implausible dachshunds in the examining some sheets of new Any "gastronom" is central Mos- Mlle. Revolution is once again music; they discuss them animated- cow is crowded with more people triumphant over a cowardly, gouty, clean streets near the cathedral. ly for two hours without ever a than you can find on the vast trembling aristocracy. But the ap- in Paris, in a modernistic cafe thought of the Front Populaire. stretch of pavement from the Lenin plause is nervous, spotty, unctuous, Museum to the onion-domed St. badly timed, over-zealous. Two- Parisians, both male and female, As the sun sets over the Bran- Basil Cathedral; a "gastronom" is thirds of the people in the audience. are learning to drink their coffee in denburger Tor a column of Brown a grocery store, and a hurry, standing up, alas, but they Shirts marches along Unter den are lined three deen Musco and rigid, like a visiting delegation counters do not applaud at all, but sit cold are still outnumbered a thousand Linden, in the centre, where the vites appraising the appeal of 100 at a pep meeting. to one by the meffable sitters at lindens were before the new sub- grams of smoked sturgeon against they go out to the foyer to devour the sidewalk tables. Rheims is Sway extension was built. Their 100 grams of goat's milk cheese, both vast quantities of pastry and con- still patching its cathedral at a swastika banners are flying, four at fabulous prices. But such delica fections. leisurely pace, but three
This audience itself is or five of them abreast, and their cies purchasable at any price are the new aristocracy of Russia, and away brawny, perspiring girls are drums are beating. Do the throngs a new miracle, and bring a new like any aristocracy is apt to be corking champagne bottles in a or the sidewalks pause and shout glint to the eyes of the Muscovites shocked by too violent a portrayal, mild frenzy.
“Heil!" and give the horizontal
revolution and dethronement.
blocks
Between- acts
There is unrest in the mind of
There is also a glint in the eyes Around Montreux in Switzerland salute and fan themselves into an- women with their sleeves rolled up ecstasy of patriotism? No; as far of Berliners whose noses are press- are still laundering their clothes in as one can see in both directions. ed hard against the window pane fountains and small streams, exact on both sides of the street, every of a rotisserie on Friedrichstrasse. ly as they did in the geography books one diligently pays no attention Even stalwarts in the brown-shirt Europe, but it scarcely marches and that's something whispers and whatever, even when the banners uniform stop to smack their lips with such a unanimous goosestep shouts cannot change overnight. pass; every one continues to walk But few stop in to buy, a mark and in any country as it marches in the quintessential dispatches and in or chat or gaze into the shop win- a half is a mark and a half.
the headlines. A picture of Soviet troops marching through Red leben, is difficult to live twenty-four Square is not a picture of Russia, hours a day, flesh and blood do not a dynamic photograph of a Nazi
easily to a career of con- gathering at Nuremberg is not
sis, of perpetual patrioti are of all Germany nor of-its cofoundest dep snapshot of upraised hands congan Rome
Some-one's Summer-villa at Lake dows at neckties and automobiles. Alas, the heroic life, das Helden Maggiore is getting a new coat of Not a salute nor a heal, this is not paint, and Rome is busy excavating a Nuremberg holiday.
old ruins with modern machinery. At Naples the youthful pairs re- turning from a late movie
each other skittishly and some
win
one's washing hanging out dow at Sorrento obscures part of a grandiloquent slogan painted
letters a foot high on the wall
On glancing about in amazeme
Life yields to its sustained deman
32 Fascist in his bli
his small son
the
thousa
beneath Il Ducer
mind of Italy.