Chapter XI: Front Matter (11)

We have no reason to believe that Germany will break up suddenly and dramatically. She took two generations to prepare herself in every detail and through every fibre of her national being for this war. She is playing for the highest stakes in the world--the dominion of the world. It seems to me that she must either win or bleed to death almost where her lines run today.

Therefore, we and our allies must continue to pass our children through fire to Moloch until Moloch perish.

In Belgium at this hour several million Belgians are making war material or fortifications for their conquerors. They receive enough food to support life, as the German thinks it should be supported, (by the way, I believe the United States of America supplies a large part of that food.) In return they are compelled to work at the point of the bayonet. If they object, they are shot. They have no more property and no more rights than cattle, and they cannot lift a hand to protect the honor of their women.

There has been nothing like the horror of their fate in all history.

If Germany is victorious, every refinement of outrage which is within the compass of the German imagination will be inflicted on us in every aspect of our lives. Realize, too, that if the Allies are beaten there will be no spot on the globe where a soul can escape from the domination of this enemy of mankind.

There has been childish talk that the Western Hemisphere would offer a refuge from oppression. Put that thought from your mind. If the Allies were defeated Germany would not need to send a single battleship over the Atlantic. She would issue an order, and it would be obeyed.

Civilization would be bankrupt, and the Western world would be taken over with the rest of the wreckage by Germany, the receiver.

So you see that there is no retreat possible. There are no terms and no retreat in this war. It must go forward, and with those men of England, who are eligible for service but who have not yet offered themselves, the decision of war rests.

This is, for us, in truth a war to death against the power of darkness with whom any peace except on our own terms would be more terrible than any war.

Garibaldi's Promise.

By KATHERINE DRAYTON MAYRANT SIMONS, JR.

_O Loveland of the Poets,
In the hour of your pain,
Does Garibaldi's promise
To your heroes hold again?_

There were fisher lads among them,
In the shirt of peasant red,
And mountaineers from Tyrol,
When Garibaldi said:

"I have no prayer to make you,
For to God alone I kneel!
I have no price to pay you,
For your wage is Austrian steel!

"There is naught of knightly emblem
For the honor of the brave,
And the only land I grant you
Will be length to mark your grave!

"I promise cold and hunger
In the stead of drink and meat!
I promise death, my brothers,
Shall be yours before defeat!"

_O Sweetheart of the Nations,
In the hour of your pain,
Does Garibaldi's promise
To Italia hold again?_

The Uncivilizable Nation

By Emile Verhaeren.

The Belgian poet whom Maurice Maeterlinck preferred should
rank among the Immortals of the French Academy when that
honor was bestowed upon himself, has contributed to Les
Annales the following account of Germany and the German
people. The translation is that appearing on June 11 in The
Suffragette of England.

Life is not a means; life is an end. That is what we must tell ourselves in order really to live in this world. Hence the obligation to perfect life, to make it high and beautiful, to make a masterpiece of it. Hence too our contempt and hatred for those who wish to tarnish life, either by their thoughts or by their deeds.

Germany behaves as though it were the most backward among nations. And indeed it is in spite of appearances essentially feudal. There is perhaps a German culture, but there is no German _civilization_.

One may be well informed and yet be hardly civilized. A sense of duty to humanity, a sense of pride, a sense of liberty are independent, certainly not of intelligence, but are independent of mere knowledge of accumulated facts.

The German professor is a walking library. He collects, he arranges, he comments. Arrangement and discipline with him take the place of everything else, and they inculcate in him the spirit of dependence and of servility. It is perhaps because he classifies so much that he is so dully submissive. Everything according to his view is an ascending or descending scale. Everything is in its compartment.

How, then, can we be surprised if everything becomes materialized and the mind of each Teuton can lay claim to be nothing more than a sort of stiff and dingy compartment, in a sort of social chessboard.

It has already been said: The German invents almost nothing. He works upon the inventions of other people. In order to invent he would have to possess the spirit of rebellion against that which is. He is incapable of that spirit. He is a being who always accepts.

But as soon as a new discovery has been made by others the German gets hold of it. He examines it patiently. He turns and returns it this way, that way, and every way. He, as it were, criticises it. He thus succeeds in augmenting its power. Moreover, he wishes that it shall serve a practical purpose and be classified accordingly, just as he himself serves and is classified in life.

Never have the Germans opened up a great road in science. They open up only bypaths. Leibnitz and Kant joined their paths to the royal high road of Descartes. Haeckel would hardly have existed if Darwin had not existed. Koch and Behring are dependent upon the labors of Pasteur.

This second-hand science is excellent as a means of attracting mediocre minds. To work, each in his little corner, at solving some secondary question, and to believe one's self a somebody when one is hardly anybody, flatters the universal vanity. All the little provincial universities of Germany can live in the illusion that they are full of learned men--thanks to the German conception of what is learned and serious!

It is a system of regimenting in great barracks of laboratories. It is the absolute negation of the spirit of initiative of spontaneity and it is above all the negation of the spirit of protest and revolt.

If the German people had been truly civilized they would never have maintained silence before the assassination of Belgium. Even among those whose ideas are contrary to the existing political order in Germany, none has risen up against this crime admitted and proclaimed at the beginning of the war in full Parliament by the Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg himself. The universal astonishment at such a silence was so great that even today the world has not recovered from it. Apart from Liebknecht the whole of German Social Democracy is dishonored: it is desired to expel the German Socialists from the International Socialist Movement. They excuse themselves; they aggravate their fault. They say:

"We should have been arrested and imprisoned." The world replies:

"Are they then afraid of dying?"

In the German Socialist Party everything has been reduced to method and organized as in the German universities and the German Army.

There were I know not how many Socialist electors; German Socialism was thought to be already triumphant and invincible. People said: "They _are_ Germany!"

The German Socialists were held up as an example to all the democracies of the earth.

Those who swore by the German Socialists affirmed that they would devour Kaiserism when it should become necessary. But last August in one hour in the Reichstag it was the German Socialist Party that was devoured!

When recently certain German Socialists visited the _Maison du Peuple_ of Brussels they expressed astonishment that the Socialists of Belgium should attach so much importance to the invasion of their country.

"When then binds you to your country?" they asked.

"Honor," was the reply.

"Honor! Honor! that is a very bourgeois ideal," interrupted the Germans.

Yet a true civilization has as its framework precisely honor. Honor is not a bourgeois ideal, but an aristocratic ideal. It was slowly created by the flower of humanity throughout the centuries. When force becomes educated, force opposes itself. It limits and incloses itself. It becomes intelligent and tempered by reserve and by tact. Brutal force thus changes into moral force, power becomes justice.

The more a nation lends itself to such a change, the more it rises from the material plane toward the spiritual plane. The more it enshrines in its institution respect for humanity as a whole, the greater and more civilized it becomes. Such a nation remains faithful to its pledged word; neither interest nor even necessity moves it to commit felony. It loves to protect and not to oppress those who are weaker than itself. It has at heart the work of propagating throughout the world certain principles of social life which certainly are utopian, but are yet beautiful to have before the eyes and in the heart, in order to live not only for the present, but also for the future.

These admirable principles which may never be put wholly into practice, but toward which we must try to grow always nearer, are the expression of the deepest human generosity. They are the radical negation of brutal and primitive force; they incline the world toward a unanimous and serene peace. They have based on faith the infinite perfectibility of conscience. Only a nation of a high degree of civilization can conceive of relations so perfect between human beings and cherish dreams so great.

Germany was never capable of this. The individual German is the least subtle and the least susceptible to education of any in the world.

It has been my lot to take part in certain European capitals in a number of reunions where English, French, Italians, and Germans came together and conversed. They were all, I was assured, distinguished people, of whom their respective nations might be proud. Now, the German was rarely to be seen in an excellent attitude. He was at once embarrassed and arrogant. He lacked refinement. His politeness was clumsy. He was as though afraid of seeming not to know everything. The most eccentric taste seemed to him the best taste. To him to be up to date was to be up to the minute. He would have been wretched if any one in his presence had claimed to be up to the second.

As soon as he had the chance to speak and got a hearing, he inaugurated, as it were, a course of lectures. Clearness was not at all necessary to him. One rarely understood precisely what he meant. The fastidiousness and subtlety which led others to seek perfection in phrase and thought had little attraction for him. With what heaviness the German diplomat discusses matters at the council table! With what clumsiness the German conqueror plants himself in a conquered country! While France, at the end of half a century, makes herself beloved in Savoy, at Mentone, and at Nice, while in the space of two centuries she assimilates Lille and Dunkirk and Strasburg and Alsace; while England in a few decades unites to her Egypt and the Cape, Germany remains detested in Poland, Schleswig, and in Alsace-Lorraine. Germany is essentially the persona ingrata everywhere it presents itself. It knows only the methods that divide, and not those which unite. Germany makes proclamations that act upon the mind as the frost acts upon plants. Germany knows neither how to attract nor how to charm nor how to civilize, because she has no personal and profound moral force.

Europe under the successive spiritual hegemonies of Athens, Rome, and Paris remained the most admirable centre of human development that has ever been.

Under German hegemony Europe would move toward a sort of gloomy and hard organization under which everything would be impeccable, arranged only because everything would be tyrannized over from above.

For the true Germany--we have today the sad but immovable conviction of this--was never that of Goethe, of Beethoven, nor of Heine. It was that of implacable Landgraves and fierce soldiers.

For thousands of years Germany has let loose its hordes upon Europe; Vandals, Visigoths, Alains, Franks, Herules. Germany continues to do this at the present day. It is Germany's terrible and sinister function.

Only let us not deceive ourselves as to this point in future, Germany is the dangerous nation because it is the uncivilizable nation, because its castles, its fields, and its barracks have remained the inexhausted, and perhaps the inexhaustible, reservoirs of human ferocity.

EMILE VERHAEREN.

Retreat in the Rain.

By O.C.A. CHILD.

Those Uhlans now are working in too near,
Their carbines crackle louder every shot.
I say! our chaps a-plodding in the rear
Are getting it--and most uncommon hot!
It's not much fun retreating in the night,
Through all this mess of rain and reeking slime--
It seems to me this boot's infernal tight!
I must have hurt me when I slipped that time.
Whew! that was close and there's a fellow gone!
I know too well that heavy, sickening thud;
It's bitter hard that we must keep right on
And leave our wounded helpless in the mud.
My foot hurts so that I can hardly see--
I'll have to stop for just a breathing space.
What's that? It's blood!--those fiends have got me now!
It's double time and I can't stand the pace!
I'll use my rifle as a crutch. But, no!
I'll stand and fight; they have me sure as day!
It's death for death--then I will meet it so
And make a Uhlan pay the price I pay.
And here they come! Great God, they're coming fast--
Are almost on me! Ah, I got that one!
Just one more shot--a good one for the last!
Those iron hoofs have crushed me--I am done!

War a Game for Love and Honor

By Jerome K. Jerome

The chivalrous spirit of the present conflict informs this
article, which appeared originally in The London Daily News
under the title "The Greatest Game of All: The True Spirit
of War," and is here reproduced by special permission of Mr.
Jerome.

War has been described as the greatest of games. I am not going to quarrel with the definition. I am going to accept it. From that point of view there is something to be said for it. As a game it can be respectable; as a business it is contemptible. Wars for profit--for gold mines, for mere extension of territory, for markets--degrade a people. It is like playing cricket for money. A gentleman--man or nation--does not do such things. But war for love--for love of the barren hillside, for love of the tattered flag, for love of the far-off dream--played for a hope, a vision, a faith, with life and death as the stakes! Yes, there is something to be said for it.

Looked at practically, what, after all, does it matter whether Germany or Britannia rules the waves? Our tea and our 'baccy, one takes it, would still be obtainable; one would pay for it in marks instead of shillings. Our sailor men, instead of answering "Aye, aye, Sir," in response to Captain's orders, would learn to grunt "Jawohl." Their wages, their rations would be much the same.

These peaceful Old World villages through which I love to wander with my dogs; these old gray churches round which our dead have crept to rest; these lonely farmsteads in quiet valleys musical with the sound of mother creatures calling to their young; these old men with ruddy faces; these maidens with quiet eyes who give me greeting as we pass by in the winding lanes between the hedgerows; the gentle, patient horses nodding gravely on their homeward way; these tiny cottages behind their trim bright gardens; this lilliputian riot round the schoolhouse door; the little timid things in fur and feather peering anxious, bright-eyed from their hiding places! Suppose the miracle to happen. Suppose the weather-beaten board nailed to the old beech tree warning us in faded lettering as we pass beneath it of the penalties awaiting trespassers were to be superseded by a notice headed "Verboten!" What essential difference would there be--that a wise man need vex his soul concerning? We should no longer call it England. That would be all. The sweep of the hills would not be changed; the path would still wind through the woodland. Yet just for a name we are ready to face ruin and death.

It certainly is not business. A business man would stop to weigh the pros and cons. A German invasion! It would bring what so many of us desire: Conscription, tariff reform. It might even get rid of Lloyd George and the Insurance act. And yet that this thing shall not be, Tory Squire and Laborer Hodge, looking forward to a lifelong wage of twelve-and-six-pence a week, will fight shoulder to shoulder, die together, if need be, in the same ditch. Just for a symbol, a faith we call England. I should say Britain.

Can we explain it even to ourselves? Thousands of Germans come over to England to live. They prosper among us, take their pleasures with us, adapt themselves to our English ways, and learn to prefer them. Thousands of Englishmen make their homes in German cities; find German ways of living, if anything, suit them better. Suddenly there arises the question, shall English ways of life or German ways of life prevail: English or German culture--which shall it be? And the English who have lived contentedly in Germany for years hasten back to fight for England, and the desire of every German in England is to break up his pleasant home among us and fight to bring all Europe into German ways of thinking.

Clearly the definition is a right one. It is just a game.

Just as all life is a game; joy and sorrow the zest of it, suffering the strength-giving worth of it. Till Death rings his bell, and the game is over--for the present. What have we learned from it? What have we gained from it? Have we played it to our souls' salvation, learning from it courage, manhood? Or has it broken us, teaching us mean fear and hate?

I quote from the letter of a young cavalry officer writing from the trenches:

Although I can't pretend to like this nightmare, I cannot
help realizing that it is doing something for those of us
who are going through it that we otherwise would have
missed; it brings out either the best or worst in a man. It
makes character.

He speaks of a little black dog. They are living in two feet of water, he and his men. The German lines are a hundred yards off; wounds, disease, and death are around them. They are worried about this wretched little dog. He has, it seems, lost his people, and is not to be comforted. It is a curious picture. One sees the straggling line of grimy, mud-stained men. They are there to kill; their own life hangs on a thread. A nightmare of blood and dust and horror, and in the midst of it, growing there as if the soil suited it, this flower of pity for a little fellow-creature.

I quote from another letter:

I can assure you there is none of that insensate hatred that
one hears about out here. We are out to kill, and kill we do
at every opportunity. But when it is all over the splendid
universal soldier spirit comes over all the men. Just to
give you some idea of what I mean, the other night four
German snipers were shot on our wire. The next night our men
went out and brought one in who was near and getatable and
buried him. They did it with just the same reverence and
sadness as they do our own dear fellows. I went to look at
the grave next morning, and one of the most uncouth-looking
men in my company had placed a cross at the head of the
grave, and had written on it:

Here lies a German,
We don't know his name,
He died bravely fighting
For his Fatherland.

And under that "Got mitt uns," (sic,) that being the highest
effort of all the men at German.

"Got mitt uns." One has the idea that He is--when the game is played in that spirit. God with us both, shaping brotherhood out of enmity.

Bernard Shaw in a moment of inspiration thinks that some way will have to be found enabling England and Germany to live together peaceably for the future. It is an idea that may possibly have occurred to others. Well, perhaps this is the way. Shaw would not approve of it. But then there is so much in human nature that Shaw does not approve of. There are times when one is compelled to a great pity for Shaw. He seems to have got into the wrong world. He is for ever thanking God that he is not as we other men--we Englishmen and Germans, mere publicans and sinners. It is a difficult world to understand, I admit, my dear Shaw, full of inconsistencies and contradictions. Perhaps there is a meaning in it somewhere that you have missed.

Perhaps we have got to fight one another before we understand one another. In the old Norse mythology Love is the wife of Strife; when we come to consider the nature of man, not such an odd union as it appears.

So long as the law runs that in sorrow woman shall bring forth her child; so long as the ground shall yield to the sons of Adam thorns also and thistles, so long will there be strife between man and man. So long, when the last word has been spoken and has failed, will there be war between the nations. The only hope of civilization is to treat it as a game. You cannot enforce a law without a policeman. You can only appeal to a man's honor--to his sporting instincts.

The mistake Germany is making is in not treating war as a game. To do so would be weakness and frivolity. War must be ruthless, must be frightful. It is not to be bound down by laws human or Divine. And even then she is not logical. Two German officers interned in Holland are released on parole. Taking their country at her word, they hasten back to rejoin their regiments. The German Staff is shocked, sends them back to be imprisoned.

So there really are rules to the game. An officer and gentleman may not lie. If a Sub-Lieutenant may not lie for the sake of his country, then what argument gives the right to the German Government to tear up its treaties, to the German Military Staff to disregard its Ambassador's signature to The Hague Convention?

Come, shade of Bismarck, and your disciples in Germany and other countries, (including a few in my own,) make up your mind. To be ruthless and frightful in a half-hearted, nervous, vacillating fashion is ridiculous. You have either got to go back to the beginning of things, and make war a battle of wild beasts, or you have got to go forward and make it a game--a grim game, I grant you, but one that the nations can play at and shake hands afterward. We have tried the ruthless and frightful method. We used to slaughter the entire population. To shoot a selected few is to court a maximum of contempt for a minimum of advantage. We used to lay waste the land. We did not content ourselves with knocking down a church spire and burning a library. We left not one stone upon another. We sowed salt where the cities had been. We tortured our prisoners before the ramparts. We did not "leave them their eyes to weep with"; we burned them out with hot irons; surely a much swifter means of striking terror! Why not return to these methods? They sound most effective.

They were not effective. God's chosen people--according to themselves--did not annihilate the Philistines, not even with the help of the Ark of the Covenant. The Philistines tightened their belts and acquitted themselves like men. Today the heathen rules in Canaan. Where Mohammed failed the shade of Bismarck is not likely to succeed. Poland is still a sore in European politics. The whole force of the Vatican could not suppress a handful of reformers. All the bloodthirsty edicts of the Revolution could not annihilate a few thousand aristocrats. These things cannot be done. War finishes nothing, it only interrupts. A nation cannot be killed; it can only die. This war is not going to be the end of all things either for Germany or for us. Germany can be beaten to her knees, as she beat France to her knees in 1870; as more than once before that France has beaten her. Later on we have all got to live together in peace, for a while.

Come, gentlemen, let us make an honorable contest of it, that shall leave as little of bitterness behind it as may be. Let us see if we cannot make a fine game of it that we shall be all the better for having played out to the end. From which we shall all come back home cleaner minded, clearer seeing, made kinder to one another by suffering. Come, gentlemen, you believe that God has called upon you to spread German culture through the lands. You are ready to die for your faith. And we believe God has a use for the thing called England. Well, let us fight it out. There seems no other way. You for St. Michael and we for St. George; and God be with us both.

But do not let us lose our common humanity in the struggle. That were the worst defeat of all--the only defeat that would really matter, that would really be lasting.

Let us call it a game. After all, what else is it? We have been playing it since the dawn of creation; and it has settled nothing--but the names of things. Its victories, its defeats! Time wipes them off the slate, with a smile.

I quote from a letter written by the officer who boarded the Emden. He speaks of the German officers: "A thoroughly nice fellow"--"also a good fellow." The order is given that there be no cheering from the Sydney when entering the harbor with her prisoners. English sailormen have fought with German sailormen; have killed a good many of them. It is over. No crowing, gentlemen--over fellow-sailormen. Our writer discusses the fight generally with Captain von Muller. "We agreed it was our job to knock one another out. But there was no malice in it."

We shall do better to regard war as a game--a game to be played for love, for honor, without hatred, without malice. So only shall we profit by it.

THE BELGIAN WAR MOTHERS

By Charlotte Porter