SECRET HISTORY.

Shannon News, 25 May 1923, Page 4

SECRET HISTORY.

RECORDED IN THE RUHR. DUSSELDOJRF. The drama of die Ruhr Is not played m the limelight. It- is underground, both figuratively and literally. It is the drama of two widely diilerent nationalities clashing at a hundred points, and resembling each other only in their native obstinacy. The French are, for the moment, in the role of the oppressors, hut the Germans are not oppressed. They have not perhaps that full and wonderful “liberty” (say© Ihe mark!) that they-enjoyed more or less under the lteicli. They have to do certain things that their Reigerungsprausideuten and Oberburgermeister say shall not d : o. They end by doing them, and the Herr Reigerungs, etc., and Ober, etc., pass painlessly away into an easily forgotten martyrdom in some pleasant town on the border of tile occupied area. The real actors in the drama are the unnamed men and women whom one pusses in the streets of Dusseldorf, of Mulheim, of Essen, for they are the people who, in the vulgar parlance are for the moment “getting it in the neck.”

The French pressure on the Ruhr is ieit in every family. We Who are mere sojourners on the fringe of history are not allowed to see into the heart of the dwellers in the Ruhr. We are only allowed to guess. Yet how. can we guess wrong when we see, as we have seen in Dusseldorf, an entire town put to sleep, its corporate commercial life stopped dead, at the behest of its co-operate municipal spirit The business life of Dusseldorf stopped dead at mid-day, not for 'any festival, but because the leading spirit of Dusseldorf had been sent into exile. The Herr Oberburgermeister, whose very name at this moment I cannot recall, has been expelled. He had served the town well. He had kept its streets clean, its tramciars running to schedule, its civic drains well flushed. He was efficient and he was popular. His passing was mourned With a general strike. The general strike is only a fragment of the day’s news from the Ruhr. But it is a part, and a vital part of the underground, invisible land intangible drama that is being played out in this 'amphitheatre that, politically, we call “the basin of the Ruhr.”