Chapter IV (1)

On this journey of ours, which for me was essentially not a progress but a retracing of footsteps on a road travelled before, I had no beacons to look out for in Germany. I had never lingered in that land, which, as a whole, is so singularly barren of memorable manifestations of generous sympathies and magnanimous impulses. An ineradicable, invincible provincialism of envy and vanity clings to the forms of its thought like a frowsy garment. Even while yet very young I turned my eyes away from it instinctively, as from a threatening phantom. I believe that children and dogs have, in their innocence, a special power of perception as far as spectral apparitions and coming misfortunes are concerned.

I let myself be carried through Germany as if it were pure space, without sights, without sounds. No whispers of the war reached my voluntary abstraction. And perhaps not so very voluntary, after all! Each of us is a fascinating spectacle to himself, and I had to watch my own personality returning from another world, as it were, to revisit the glimpses of old moons. Considering the condition of humanity, I am, perhaps, not so much to blame for giving myself up to that occupation. We prize the sensation of our continuity, and we can only capture it in that way. By watching.

We arrived in Cracow late at night. After a scrambly supper, I said to my eldest boy, “I can’t go to bed. I must go out for a look round. Coming?”

He was ready enough. For him all this was part of the interesting adventure of the whole journey. We stepped out of the portal of the hotel into an empty street, very silent and bright with moonlight. I was indeed revisiting the glimpses of the moon. I felt so much like a ghost that the discovery that I could remember such material things as the right turn to take and the general direction of the street gave me a moment of wistful surprise.

The street, straight and narrow, ran into the great Central Square of the town, the centre of its affairs and of the lighter side of its life. We could see at the far end of the street a promising widening of space. At the corner an unassuming (but armed) policeman, wearing ceremoniously at midnight a pair of white gloves, which made his big hands extremely noticeable, turned his head to look at the grizzled foreigner holding forth in a strange tongue to a youth on whose arm he leaned.

The square, immense in its solitude, was full to the brim of moonlight. The garland of lights at the foot of the houses seemed to burn at the bottom of a bluish pool. I noticed with intimate satisfaction that the unnecessary trees the Municipality persisted in sticking between the stones had been steadily refusing to grow. They were not a bit bigger than the poor victims I could remember. Also, the paving operations seemed to be exactly at the same point at which I left them forty years before. There were the dull, torn-up patches on that lighted expanse, the piles of paving material looking ominously black, like heads of rocks on a silvery sea. Who was it that said Time works wonders? What an exploded superstition! As far as these trees and these paving-stones were concerned it had worked nothing. The suspicion of the unchangeableness of things already vaguely suggested to my senses by our rapid drive from the railway station and by the short walk, was agreeably strengthened within me.

“We are now on the line A.B.,” I said to my companion, importantly.

It was the name bestowed in my time to that side of the square by the senior students of that town of classical learning and historical relics. The common citizens knew nothing of it, and even if they had, would not have dreamed of taking it seriously. He who used it was of the initiated, belonged to the Schools. We youngsters regarded that name as a fine jest, the invention of a most excellent fancy. Even as I uttered it to my boy I experienced again that sense of privilege, of initiation. And then, happening to look up at the wall, I saw in the light of the corner lamp, a white, cast-iron tablet fixed thereon, bearing an inscription in raised black letters, thus: “Line A.B.” Heavens! The name had been adopted officially! Any town urchin, any guttersnipe, any herb-selling woman of the market-place, any wandering Boetian, was free to talk of the line A.B., to walk on the line A.B., to appoint to meet his friends on the line A.B. It had become a mere name in a directory. I was stunned by the extreme mutability of things. Time _could_ work wonders, and no mistake. A Municipality had stolen an invention of excellent fancy, and a fine jest had turned into a horrid piece of cast iron.

I proposed that we should walk to the other end of the line, using the profaned name, not only without gusto, but with positive distaste. And this, too, was one of the wonders of Time, for a bare minute had worked that change. There was at the end of the line a certain street I wanted to look at, I explained to my companion.

To our right the unequal massive towers of St. Mary’s Church soared aloft into the ethereal radiance of the air, very black on their shaded sides, glowing with a soft phosphorescent sheen on the others. In the distance the Florian Gate, thick and squat under its pointed roof, barred the street with the square shoulders of the old city wall. In the narrow brilliantly pale vista of bluish flagstones and silvery fronts of houses, its black archway stood out small but very distinct.

There was not a soul in sight, and not even the echo of a footstep for our ears. Into this coldly illuminated and dumb emptiness there issued out of my aroused memory a small boy of eleven, wending his way, not very fast, to a preparatory school for day-pupils on the second floor of the third house down from Florian Gate. It was in the winter months of 1868. At eight o’clock of every morning that God made, sleet or shine, I walked up Florian Street. But of the school I remember very little. I believe that one of my co-sufferers there has become a much appreciated editor of historical documents. But I didn’t suffer very much from the various imperfections of my first school. I was rather indifferent to school troubles. I had a private gnawing worm of my own. This was the time of my father’s last illness. Every evening at seven, turning my back on the Florian Gate, I walked all the way to a big old house in a quiet little street a good distance beyond the Great Square. There, in a large drawing-room, panelled and bare, with heavy cornices and a lofty ceiling, in a little oasis of light made by two candles in a desert of dusk, I sat at a little table to worry and ink myself all over till the task of preparation was done. The table of my toil faced a tall white double door which was kept closed; but now and then it would come ajar and a nun in a white coif would squeeze herself through, glide across the room and disappear. There were two of these noiseless nursing nuns. Their voices were seldom heard. For indeed what could they have to say! When they did speak to me, it was with their lips hardly moving, in a claustral clear whisper. Domestic matters were ordered by the elderly housekeeper of our neighbour on the second floor, a Canon of the Cathedral, lent for the emergency. She too spoke but seldom. She wore a black dress with a cross hanging by a chain on her ample bosom. And though when she spoke she moved her lips more than the nuns, she never let her voice rise above a peacefully murmuring note. The air around me was all piety, resignation and silence.

I don’t know what would have become of me if I had not been a reading boy. My lessons done I would have had nothing to do but sit and watch the awful stillness of the sick-room flow out through the closed white door and coldly enfold my scared heart. I suppose that in a futile childish way I would have gone crazy. But I was a reading boy. There were many books about, lying on consoles, on tables, and even on the floor, for we had not had time to settle down. I read! What did I not read! Sometimes the eldest nun gliding up and casting a mistrustful glance at the open pages would lay her hand lightly on my head and suggest in a doubtful whisper: “Perhaps it isn’t very good for you to read these books.” I would raise my eyes to her face mutely and with a vague gesture of giving it up she would glide away.

Later in the evening, but not always, I would be permitted to tiptoe into the sick-room to say good-night to the figure prone on the bed which often could not recognise my presence but by a slow movement of the eyes, put my lips dutifully to the nerveless hand lying on the coverlet, and tiptoe out again. Then I would go to bed, in a room at the end of a corridor, and often, not always, cry myself into a good, sound sleep.

I looked forward to what was coming with an incredulous terror. I turned my eyes from it, sometimes with success; and yet all the time I had an awful sensation of the inevitable. I had also moments of revolt which stripped off me some of my simple trust in the government of the universe. But when the inevitable entered the sick-room and the white door was thrown wide open, I don’t think I found a single tear to shed. I have a suspicion that the Canon’s housekeeper looked upon me as the most callous little wretch on earth.

The day of the funeral came in due course, and all the generous “Youth of the Schools,” the grave Senate of the University, the delegations of the trade-guilds, might have obtained (if they cared) _de visu_ evidence of the callousness of the little wretch. There was nothing in my aching head but a few words, some such stupid sentences as: “It’s done,” or “It’s accomplished” (in Polish it is much shorter), or something of the sort, repeating itself endlessly. The long procession moved on out of the little street, down a long street, past the Gothic portal of St. Mary’s between its unequal towers, towards the Florian Gate.

In the moonlight-flooded silence of the old town of glorious tombs and tragic memories I could see again the small boy of that day following a hearse; a space kept clear in which I walked alone, conscious of an enormous following, the clumsy swaying of the tall black machine, the chanting of the surpliced clergy at the head, the flames of tapers passing under the low archway of the gate, the rows of bared heads on the pavements with fixed, serious eyes. Half the population had turned out on that fine May afternoon. They had not come to honour a great achievement, or even some splendid failure. The dead and they were victims alike of an unrelenting destiny which cut them off from every path of merit and glory. They had come only to render homage to the ardent fidelity of the man whose life had been a fearless confession in word and deed of a creed which the simplest heart in that crowd could feel and understand.

It seemed to me that if I remained longer there in that narrow street I should become the helpless prey of the Shadows I had called up. They were crowding upon me, enigmatic and insistent, in their clinging air of the grave that tasted of dust and in the bitter vanity of all hopes.

“Let’s go back to the hotel, my boy,” I said. “It’s getting late.”

It will be easily understood that I neither thought nor dreamt that night of a possible war. For the next two days I went about amongst my fellow men, who welcomed me with the utmost consideration and friendliness, but unanimously derided my fears of a war. They would not believe in it. It was impossible. On the evening of the second day I was in the hotel’s smoking-room, an irrationally private apartment, a sanctuary for a few choice minds of the town, always pervaded by a dim religious light, and more hushed than any club reading-room I’ve ever been in. Gathered into a small knot, we were discussing the situation in subdued tones suitable to the genius of the place.

A gentleman with a fine head of white hair suddenly pointed an impatient finger in my direction and apostrophised me.

“What I want to know is whether, should there be war, England would come in.”

The time to draw a breath, and I spoke out for the Cabinet without faltering.

“Most assuredly. I should think all Europe knows that by this time.”

He took hold of the lapel of my coat and, giving it a slight jerk for greater emphasis, said forcibly:

“Then if England will, as you say, and all the world knows it, there can be no war. Germany won’t be so mad as that.”

On the morrow by noon we read of the German ultimatum. The day after came the declaration of war and the Austrian mobilisation order. We were fairly caught. All that remained for me to do was to get my party out of the way of eventual shells. The best move which occurred to me was to snatch them up instantly into the mountains to a Polish health resort of great repute--which I did (at the rate of one hundred miles in eleven hours) by the last civilian train permitted to leave Cracow for the next three weeks.

And there we remained amongst the Poles from all parts of Poland, not officially interned, but simply unable to obtain permission to travel by train or road. It was a wonderful, a poignant two months. This is not the time, and perhaps not the place, to enlarge upon the tragic character of the situation; a whole people seeing the culmination of its misfortunes in a final catastrophe, unable to trust any one, to appeal to any one, to look for help from any quarter; deprived of all hope, and even of its last illusions, and unable in the trouble of minds and the unrest of consciences to take refuge in stoical acceptance. I have seen all this. And I am glad I have not so many years left me to remember that appalling feeling of inexorable Fate, tangible, palpable, come after so many cruel years, a figure of dread, murmuring with iron lips the final words: “Ruin--and Extinction.”

But enough of this. For our little band there was the awful anguish of incertitude as to the real nature of events in the West. It is difficult to give an idea how ugly and dangerous things looked to us over there. Belgium knocked down and trampled out of existence, France giving in under repeated blows, a military collapse like that of 1870, and England involved in that disastrous alliance, her army sacrificed, her people in a panic! Polish papers, of course, had no other than German sources of information. Naturally, we did not believe all we heard, but it was sometimes excessively difficult to react with sufficient firmness. We used to shut our door, and there, away from everybody, we sat weighing the news, hunting up discrepancies, scenting lies, finding reasons for hopefulness, and generally cheering each other up. But it was a beastly time. People used to come to me with very serious news and ask, “What do you think of it?” And my invariable answer was, “Whatever has happened or is going to happen, whoever wants to make peace, you may be certain that England will not make it, not for ten years, if necessary.”

But enough of this, too. Through the unremitting efforts of Polish friends we obtained at last the permission to travel to Vienna. Once there, the wing of the American Eagle was extended over our uneasy heads. We cannot be sufficiently grateful to the American Ambassador (who all along interested himself in our fate) for his exertions on our behalf, his invaluable assistance, and the real friendliness of his reception in Vienna. Owing to Mr. Penfield’s action we obtained permission to leave Austria. And it was a near thing, for his Excellency has informed my American publishers since that a week later orders were issued to have us detained until the end of the war. However, we effected our hair’s-breadth escape into Italy and, reaching Genoa, took passage in a Dutch mail-steamer, homeward bound from Java, with London as a port of call.

On that sea route I might have picked up a memory at every mile if the past had not been eclipsed by the tremendous actuality. We saw the signs of it in the emptiness of the Mediterranean, the aspect of Gibraltar, the misty glimpse in the Bay of Biscay of an outward-bound convoy of transports, in the presence of British submarines in the Channel. Innumerable drifters flying the naval flag dotted the narrow waters, and two naval officers coming on board off the South Foreland piloted the ship through the Downs.

The Downs! There they were, thick with the memories of my sea life. But what were to me now the futilities of individual past! As our ship’s head swung into the estuary of the Thames a deep, yet faint, concussion passed through the air, a shock rather than a sound, which, missing my ear, found its way straight into my heart. Turning instinctively to look at my boys, I happened to meet my wife’s eyes. She also had felt profoundly, coming from far away across the grey distances of the sea, the faint boom of the big guns at work on the coast of Flanders--shaping the future.

JOSEPH CONRAD

LIBERTÀ NELLA VITA

Da un’ anno, l’orror della guerra, e l’affanno della coscienza, per comprenderne la inevitable necessità. L’Antico Libro dice: “_La spada levata per uccidere guarisce talvolta_,” e a nostri giorni, una povera donna del popolo firmo una carta questo affirmando: “_Sia la guerra, per distrugger la guerra_;” e la povera donna del popolo ha due figlioli al fronte.

--Infinita è la strage, e in ogni terra, disperazione e protesta!

--Per tanto dolore nel mondo, per ogni giovane esistenza troncata, sia conquista e diritto, per ogni Patria, il somme dei beni: La libertà nella Vita.

ELEONORA DUSE

_Il Cerro,

Boscolungo Pistoiese_

THE RIGHT TO LIBERTY

[TRANSLATION]

For the past year the horror of war, and the struggle of our minds to comprehend its inevitable necessity!--Holy Writ says: “For all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword,” and now in our day a poor woman of the people ends her letter with these words: “There must be war, that war may perish”--and this poor woman of the people has two sons at the front.

Infinite is the suffering, and over the earth wailing and despair!

Through all this sorrow in the world, through all these young lives cut short, may victory bring to every land the crown of life--the right to Liberty.

ELEONORA DUSE

_Il Cerro,

Boscolungo Pistoiese_

TWO WOMEN

FROM AN ORIGINAL WATER-COLOUR SKETCH]

_JOHN GALSWORTHY_

HARVEST

The sky to-night looks as if a million bright angels were passing--a gleaming cloud-mesh drawn across the heaven. One star, very clear, shines beside a full moon white as the globe-campion flower. The wan hills and valleys, the corn-stooks, casting each its shadows, the grey boles of the beeches--all have the remoteness of an ineffable peace. And the past day was so soft, so glamorous; such a hum, such brightness, and the harvest going on....

This last year millions have died with energy but one third spent; millions more unripe for death will yet herald us into the long shades before these shambles cease--boys born just to be the meat of war, spitted on each others’ reddened bayonets, without inkling of guilt or knowledge. To what shall we turn that we may keep sane, watching this green, unripe corn, field on field, being scythed by Death for none to eat? There is no solace in the thought: Death is nothing!--save to those who still believe they go straight to Paradise. To us who dare not to know the workings of the Unknowable, and in our heart of hearts cannot tell what, if anything, becomes of us,--to us, the great majority of the modern world--life is valuable, good, a thing worth living out for its natural span. For, if it were not, long ere this we should have sat with folded arms, lifting no hand till the last sighing breath of the human race had whispered itself out into the wind, and a final darkness come; sat, like the Hindu Yogi, watching the sun and moon a little, and expired. The moon would be as white, and the sun as golden if we were gone, the hills and valleys as mysterious, the beech-trees just as they are, only the stooks of corn would vanish with those who garner them. If life were not good we should make of ourselves dust indifferently--we human beings; quietly, peacefully; not in murderous horror reaped by the curving volleys, mown off by rains of shrapnel, and the long yellow scythe of the foul gases. But life is good, and no living thing wishes to die; even they who kill themselves, despairing, resign out of sheer love of life; out of craving for what they have found too mutilated and starved, out of yearning for their meed of joy cruelly frustrated. And they who die that others may live are but those in whom the life-flame burns so hot and bright that they can feel the life and the longing to live in others as if it were their own--more than their own. Yea, life carries with it a very passion for existence.

To what then shall we turn that we may keep sane, watching this harvest of too young deaths, the harvest of the brave, whose stooks are raised before us, casting each its shadow in the ironic moonlight? Green corn! Green corn!

If, having watched those unripe blades reaped off and stacked so pitifully, watched the great dark Waggoner clear those unmellowed fields, we let their sacrifice be vain; if we sow not, hereafter, in a peaceful Earth that which shall become harvest more golden than the world has seen--then Shame on us, unending, in whatever land we dwell....

This harvest night is still. And yet, up there, the bright angels are passing over the moon. One Star!

JOHN GALSWORTHY

_August 28, 1915_

BOATS ON A BEACH

FROM AN EARLY CRAYON DRAWING]

_EDMUND GOSSE_

THE ARROGANCE AND SERVILITY OF GERMANY

We abound, while the war progresses, with examples of the calculated ferocity of the Germans, of their lack of humanity, of their scorn of the generous convention of behaviour. But there is a great danger that on reflection, we may be tempted to regard these developments of savagery as due to the fact of war itself, to a sudden madness of blood-lust, to rage in the face of unanticipated resistance, even to alarm, the emotion of terror being a fruitful source of cruelty as well as of cowardice. It is well, therefore, lest we be tempted to excuse the barbarism of the enemy, to cast our eyes backward and to endeavour to recall what he was in times of peace, in his domestic surroundings, unassailed by anger or fear or ill-humour. I make no apology, then, for recounting an anecdote which illustrates, I think, certain qualities which distinguish the German mentality from that of all the other races which call themselves civilised. The incident which I will proceed to describe was a trifling one, but the impression it left upon my memory was profound.

In the early summer of 1911 my wife and I joined our dear friends, the Dutch novelist Maarten Maartens and his daughter, in a motor-trip through parts of the Rhine Province, and in particular the romantic and volcanic districts of the Eiffel. Maarten Maartens (who died in Holland so lately as the 3rd of August, 1915) was the most delightful travelling companion, and the perfection of his linguistic gifts--for he spoke English, French, Italian and German in each case like a native--made the face of Europe one wide home to him. Our tour was nearly over; we had descended the Moselle, and had paused where the Benedictine Abbey of Laach, on the edge of its serene and wood-encircled crater-lake offers hospitality to the stranger; and then we went down to the Rhine and reached Königswinter late one afternoon. At Königswinter, as travellers know, there is an hotel which Germans brag of as “the best in the world.” It is, in fact, or was then, very large, sumptuously furnished, nobly situated on the bastion of the Rhine, looking right over to Drachenfels. The service was rapid and noiseless, the cooking as good as a Teuton kitchen can produce. It had the air of highly-organised prosperity, of a machine exactly suited to harmonise with wealth. To call it “the best hotel in the world” is to show a false conception of excellence as applied to hotels, but it presented everything that German luxury could demand.

We were given a row of excellent rooms on the first floor, with long windows opening on to a terrace which roofed the great restaurant, and whence there was a noble prospect. We went to bed early, and soon the whole vast establishment seemed wrapped in velvet silence. Not a sound broke in the dark warm summer night, not even a whisper from the river. Suddenly an amazing, an unintelligible riot woke the row of us from slumber. The electric light, switched hurriedly on, revealed that the hour was three. In front of us, apparently on our terrace, a turmoil was proceeding of a character to wake the dead. Explosions of glass, what seemed the deeper note of crockery, strange shrieks of metal, bassoon-like and drum-like noises, a deafening roar. Turning off the light, with face pressed to the window, there were dimly to be distinguished phantom-objects descending from above our heads, a shower of vague orbs and bosses, splinters of light, a chaos of the indescribable. Presently the hubbub ceased, deep silence reigned again, and after whispered and bewildered confabulation from door to door, we fell again to dreamless sleep.

In the morning, the riot of the night was our only subject. The terrace in front of our windows showed not the slightest evidence of any disturbance, and we almost doubted our senses. At breakfast, the man who served us knew nothing; he had not wakened all night, he declared. Maarten Maartens, more and more intrigued, insisted on asking the headwaiter. The answer of that worthy was, “There was no disturbance at any time last night. If there had been, I could not have failed to hear it.” Maarten Maartens broke from this sturdy liar, and went off to the bureau of the Hotel. Here he found the manager, with whom he was personally acquainted, seated at his desk; two or three other people were near. To the Dutch novelist’s inquiry the manager answered--“There was no noise in any part of the hotel at any time last night. You were dreaming,--you had a nightmare.” Maarten Maartens, now thoroughly baffled, almost began to think that the noise must have been a delusion of the brain; when the manager, coming to him along a passage, and glancing hither and thither to make sure no one was listening, said, “The officers of a crack regiment from Cologne were supping last night here, in the large private room on the second floor. At three o’clock, as they were leaving, they threw everything that was on the table,--glass, china, silver, everything,--out of window on to the terrace below. But before four o’clock my waiters had removed every trace of what the officers had done. I tell you the facts because you are so persistent, but I must beg you to ask no more questions and make no more remarks. If it were known to the authorities that any complaints had been made, my licence would be withdrawn. My people are so well disciplined, that not a single man or woman employed in the hotel would admit that any incident had taken place.” Maarten Maartens said, “But would you allow civilians to behave like that?” “Civilians!” exclaimed the manager; “in their case I should telephone to the police at the crash of the first wine-glass.”

Before we left Königswinter that day we went with Maarten Maartens to call on the publisher of the German edition of his writings, which had a very large sale. We were received with much ceremony in a modern house, sumptuously furnished, and set in an enchanting park which goes down to the Rhine. The civility of the great publisher and of his family was extreme. In the course of conversation Maarten Maartens, in whom the nocturnal bombardment of his bed-room rankled, told the story with a great deal of humour and liveliness. When he had finished there was a silence, and then the publisher said, very sententiously, “We never criticise the Army! Allow me to show you that part of the garden which has been finished since your last visit!”

This, then, is the spirit in which Germany has arrived at her present amazing development. It renders her unique. Can any one conceive a party of English officers, dining at the Ritz, and hurling all their plates and dishes into the street below? Can any one conceive a party of French civilians, of all classes, accepting a tyranny of arms so humiliating? The arrogance and wantonness of a military aristocracy balanced by an unquestioning servility of the great bulk of the nation. A Kultur of which the watchword is, “We never criticise the Army!” An army in which the qualities of self-respect and respect for others are totally ignored. An amalgam of these contrasted elements makes up the atrocious and formidable temperament of our enemy.

EDMUND GOSSE

A GRACIOUS ACT. (CARICATURE)

FROM A WATER-COLOUR SKETCH]

_PAUL HERVIEU_

SCIENCE ET CONSCIENCE

La caractéristique de ce conflit européen sera sans doute, aux yeux de nos descendants, qu’il aura été l’instant où la science aura failli à sa mission. La science, cet attribut des dieux dont l’anoblissement s’est étendu aux mortels depuis le temps de Prométhée, la science, cette conquête pure, cette bienfaitrice, cette aïeule tutélaire, oui! la céleste science, nous l’avons vue, en certaines mains, devenir provisoirement scélérate. Elle a choyé l’incendie, rendu pratiques les milliers d’assassinats par noyade. Elle s’est faite empoisonneuse des poumons, vitrioleuse des visages. Les savants d’outre-Rhin auront passé leurs nuits à chercher quel nouvel attentat aux lois divines et humaines, quel crime inédit pourraient être lancés en défi aux nations, par le mauvais génie de leur science à eux, par cette science qui a réussi à rendre la guerre plus hideuse encore qu’elle n’était de naissance.

Si c’étaient ces innovations impies qui dussent ouvrir les chemins que prendra l’avenir, alors une guerre future s’emploierait à rendre vénéneux les épis du froment, sophistiquerait les nuages pour que leur ondée verse les épidémies dont les germes sont actuellement découverts ou celles que créerait le travail des laboratoires allemands. La Kultur drainerait les laves des volcans sous les villes, et arrêterait d’avance les étendues d’écorce terrestre à projeter dans l’espace. Et ceux des diverses planètes, qui sont à lorgner la nôtre, constateraient, aux siècles prochains, qu’une monstrueuse science aurait fait de notre Terre, une seconde Lune, sans espèce vivante ni atmosphère, autour de laquelle des satellites soudain mort-nés seraient les continents exploses de l’Ancien-Monde, ou de l’une et l’autre Amériques.

Mais non! Le vieux maître écrivain François Rabelais a écrit: “Science sans conscience est la ruine de l’âme.” La science sans conscience sera la ruine aussi des gens qui l’ont choisie pour base de leur empire. La science démoniaque verra briser ses ailes de chauve-souris, par ce pouvoir invisible et impondérable qui, ange gardien des hommes, s’appelle la conscience.

Depuis que la civilisation est en marche, elle va lentement, patiemment, irrésistiblement, vers le mieux, vers le bien. Elle a constitué l’inépuisable réserve, l’invincible armée des valeurs morales, d’où sortent les affranchissements, les justices, les dignités de la race et toute loi de vérité. Cette puissance morale, on a l’Histoire pour en démontrer la constante victoire contre les tyrannies les plus solides, contre les violences les mieux organisées. Mais je n’en veux que la démonstration suivante:

L’État qui a dit que la force prime le droit, l’État qui a piétiné effroyablement toute faiblesse et qui n’a d’égards que pour ce qui est fort, d’où vient que cet État jugea nécessaire de mentir à son peuple, et à la face de tous les peuples sur les vraies causes de la guerre et sur les vrais auteurs responsables? D’où vient que cet État ne manque pas, à chaque occasion, de rééditer le mensonge et de s’y gargariser vainement, ridiculement, follement? Il a marqué ainsi son effroi de la conscience universelle. Celui qui ne s’inquiétait, il y a un an, ni du ciel ni de l’enfer, avait pourtant senti tout de suite, il ne cesse de sentir, aujourd’hui, l’action vengeresse et triomphale s’élaborant dans toutes les consciences de l’humanité, ennemies, neutres, et même sujettes.

PAUL HERVIEU

_de l’Académie Française_

_31 Juillet 1915_

SCIENCE AND CONSCIENCE

[TRANSLATION]

It will be left to our descendants to realize that the chief significance of this European conflict lies in its marking the moment when Science failed in her mission. Science, our heritage from the gods, whose high destiny has been fulfilling itself among mortals since the days of Prometheus: Science, mankind’s purest conquest, the benefactress, the tutelary guardian--celestial Science, corrupted by strange teachings, has turned and rent us. She has let loose the horror of fire and set her hand to the murder of thousands by drowning. She has poisoned the air that men breathe, and flung vitriol in their faces. Her votaries beyond the Rhine have passed the watches of the night in seeking some new violation of laws human and divine--some undreamt outrage to be launched against the nations by the evil genius of that Science of theirs which has made War, hideous as it was at birth, more loathsome still.

If these unholy innovations were to blaze the way for the future, we should find the war-makers of to-morrow causing the wheat-fields to bear a poisoned harvest and forcing the very clouds in heaven to rain down pestilences whose germs are known to us now, or would in time be brought to birth in the alembics of German laboratories. Kultur would channel the lava of volcanoes under great cities, and hurl into space vast stretches of the earth’s crust. The planets of the universe, watching, would learn in centuries to come that a monstrous Science had transformed our World into another Moon, void of life and air, around which swim still-born satellites that were once the blasted continents of the Old World or the Americas.

But this is not to be. The old master-writer, François Rabelais, has said: “Science without conscience spells ruin to the soul.” And so Science without conscience must mean the destruction of that nation which has chosen it as the foundation of empire. Demoniacal Science, dragon-winged, will be shattered against that invisible and imponderable force, the guardian angel of mankind, which is called Conscience.

From the dawn of civilization it has moved slowly, patiently, irresistibly toward the better, toward the good. It has constituted the inexhaustible reserve, the invincible army of moral values, out of which the liberties, the justices, the dignities of the race, and every law of truth, have come to being. History stands ready to number the victories of this moral force over the most strongly organized lawlessness and the mightiest tyrannies. And I ask no better demonstration than this:

The State which has declared that might is right, which has trampled under foot all weakness and respects only that which is strong--how comes it that this State finds itself constrained to lie to its own people and to all the nations about the true causes of this war and the men who are responsible for it? How comes it that this State never fails, whenever chance offers, to repeat the dreary lie and mouth it over desperately, absurdly, vainly? Thus does it betray its terror of the universal Conscience. The power which, one year ago, feared neither heaven nor hell, felt instantly and must ever feel the avenging and triumphant assault of all the consciences of humanity--enemy, neutral, and even subject to itself.

PAUL HERVIEU _de l’Académie Française_

_July 31, 1915_

TURKISH SOLDIER

FROM THE ORIGINAL PENCIL DRAWING MADE IN 1857]

_GÉNÉRAL HUMBERT_

LES ARABES AVAIENT RAISON

Le 28 août 1914, après une sanglante bataille, la 1^{ère} Division du Maroc avait refoulé l’ennemi de la Fosse à l’Eau dans la direction de Thin-le-Moutiers.

La nuit venue, malgré des pertes cruelles, la satisfaction était grande: chacun espérait pour le lendemain l’achèvement de la victoire.

Mais contrairement à ces prévisions, l’ordre arriva, sur le coup de onze heures du soir, de se dégager au plus vite et de marcher en retraite vers les plateaux qui dominent à l’Est la route de Mézières à Rethel.

Ce mouvement était une conséquence de la manœuvre géniale conçue dès le 25 août par le Général JOFFRE et qui devait aboutir, comme chacun sait, à la victoire de la Marne; mais nous l’ignorions.

Donc, il fallut se “décrocher” immédiatement. La nuit était très noire; les troupes accablées par une dure journée de combat, couchaient sur leurs positions.

Néanmoins, les ordres se transmirent rapidement et, à minuit, dans un silence complet, la Division retraitait en plusieurs colonnes face à l’Est.

L’ennemi allait-il éventer le mouvement? Il faillait craindre en tout cas qu’à l’aube, c’est à dire après 3 heures de marche, il ne s’en aperçut et ne commençât une poursuite qui aurait été fort gênante.

Il nous aurait en effet rattrapés au pied du plateau, alors que la Division était obligée de se former en une colonne de route unique pour y accéder.

Mais, contrairement à nos craintes rien ne gêna notre opération; à midi, les troupes étaient rassemblées et en ordre parfait dans les environs de Neuvizy, à l’Est de Launois.

Que s’était-il passé? L’ennemi était-il resté sur place? Avait-il lui-même battu en retraite?

C’est dans la journée seulement que l’explication de son attitude nous fut connue.

Par suite de l’obscurité de la nuit ou pour tout autre motif, un bataillon de Tirailleurs Algériens, celui du Commandant MIGNEROT, n’avait pas été touché par l’ordre de repliement.

Il était en toute première ligne et ne possédait d’autre ordre que celui qu’il avait reçu la veille en fin de journée: “Avant-postes de combat; résister à tout prix.”

Aussi à l’aube, lorsque l’ennemi se rendant compte enfin de notre dérobade, voulut pousser de l’avant, il trouva, au centre de notre front, tel qu’il était la veille, ce bataillon en position, ferme, résolu à exécuter son ordre coûte que coûte.

La lutte, au dire des témoins, fut homérique; accablé par des forces supérieures, écrasé par l’artillerie, le bataillon résista sur place d’abord, puis lorsqu’il fut enveloppé sur ses ailes, recula pas à pas, défendant vigoureusement chaque pouce de terrain.

C’est cette superbe attitude qui, à mon insu, assura à la Division, le temps voulu pour exécuter son ascension sur le plateau.

Mais, hélas, ce fut au prix des plus douloureux sacrifices; ce magnifique bataillon qui comptait plus de 1,000 combattants avait perdu le Commandant, la plupart des officiers et 600 hommes.

Au cours de cette glorieuse résistance se produisit l’incident que je veux raconter.

Lorsque le repli commença, il ne pouvait être question de relever morts ou blessés.--Grande fut la stupéfaction des Arabes. C’étaient de vieux soldats, qui avaient combattu un peu partout, en Algérie, au Maroc; toujours ils avaient vu leurs chefs veiller soigneusement à ce qu’aucun blessé, aucun cadavre ne risquât d’être massacré ou profané par l’ennemi--le Berbère ou le Chleuh.--Voici que cette fois, on abandonnait les blessés et les morts. Ils n’en croyaient pas leurs yeux. Des murmures s’élevèrent dans les rangs; un vieux sergent alla même jusqu’à menacer de son fusil un officier en l’appelant traître.

On eut toutes les peines du monde à leur rappeler ce qu’on leur avait pourtant dit: dans les armées de l’Europe, les blessés, les morts, lorsqu’ils tombent aux mains de l’ennemi constituent un dépôt sacré; ils sont traités avec humanité, avec respect.

Hélas, les Arabes avaient raison. Combien de fois l’avons-nous constaté avec indignation et colère!

Mais, au début de la guerre, qui de nous n’eût pas accordé à l’ennemi les sentiments qui sont l’honneur d’une armée: la générosité, l’humanité, le respect des conventions, de la parole donné?

Qui eut imaginé que 45 ans de “Kultur” produiraient de si tristes résultats?

Heureusement, nous avons trouvé à ces désillusions de douces consolations:

Comme tout se compense dans l’univers, il s’est rencontré des âmes exquises qui se sont ingéniées à opposer aux misères de la guerre, les remèdes les plus touchants.

Telle est l’œuvre des Sans-Foyer.

Pour les bienfaits qu’elle a prodigués, pour les nombreux affligés qu’elle a secourus, notre reconnaissance lui est acquise.

Honneur à ses Fondateurs.

GÉNÉRAL HUMBERT

_Q. G. IIIᵉ Armée, 28 Août 1915_

AN HEROIC STAND

[TRANSLATION]

On the 28th of August, 1914, after a hard-fought battle, the First Moroccan Division drove the enemy back from la Fosse à l’Eau, in the direction of Thin-le-Moutiers.

Despite our many losses we were exultant when night fell, and confident of winning a decisive victory the next morning.

But at eleven o’clock, contrary to our expectations, we got an order to retreat at once towards the east, in the direction of the heights which command the road from Mézières to Rethel.

This movement was part of the strategic plan made by General Joffre on the 25th of August, a plan which led, as every one now knows, to the victory of the Marne--but of that we knew nothing at the time.

The night was pitch dark. The men, worn out by the long day’s fighting, had fallen asleep where they had halted, but the order was rapidly transmitted, and at midnight, in dead silence, the columns of our Division set their faces eastward.

There was a chance that the enemy might discover our purpose. We feared that in three hours when daylight came, we should be pursued, and if we were overtaken it might be awkward, for, to mount to the plateau that lay ahead of us the Division would be obliged to take the narrow road in single column.

Nothing, however, interfered with us; we carried our movement through successfully, and soon the troops were assembled in perfect order to the east of Launois, near Neuvizy.

We could not understand why we had not been molested. Had the enemy remained where we left him, or had he retreated?

Later in the day we learnt the reason of our security. Because of the darkness, or for some other reason, the order to fall back was not transmitted to a battalion of the Tirailleurs Algériens, led by Commandant Mignerot.

The battalion therefore remained where it was, in the first fighting line, in obedience to an order of the day before, which had been to hold its ground at whatever cost.

Thus at dawn, when the enemy found we had given him the slip, and tried to follow us up, this battalion, bent on carrying out the only order it had received, was there to face him.

Those who saw the battle said it was Homeric. Overwhelmed by superior numbers, crushed by artillery, the battalion at first fought where it stood, and then, enveloped on both wings, fell back step by step, fiercely contesting every inch of ground.

That splendid stand gave the Division time to climb the heights in safety. But a heavy price was paid; when the fight began the battalion numbered more than a thousand; when it was over the Commandant, almost all his officers and six hundred of his men were dead.

It was in the course of this glorious resistance that the following incident took place. When the battalion was forced back it was impossible to carry off the dead and wounded. The Arabs were amazed. They were old soldiers who had fought all over Morocco and Algeria, and they had always seen their leaders take the utmost care that no wounded comrades, no corpse of a brave man, should be left behind to be massacred or defiled by savage tribesmen. And now they were abandoning their wounded and their dead. They could not believe their eyes; murmurs arose from the ranks; one old sergeant went so far as to menace his officer with his rifle and call him “traitor.”

Often as they had been told by their chiefs of the respect with which the dead and wounded are treated by European armies, it was almost impossible to reassure them as to the fate of their comrades.

How often since, alas, with bitter wrath, we have had reason to recall their instinctive distrust of the foe!

But in those early days of the war, which one of us would have hesitated to give our enemies credit for the feelings which are part of an Army’s very soul: generosity, humanity, respect for the word of honour?

Who could have imagined that forty-five years of “Kultur” would have borne such fruit?

Fortunately there is consolation even for such disillusionment. This is a universe of compensations, and compassionate souls are striving to lessen the inevitable misery of this most terrible of wars.

Among them we gladly reckon those who come to the aid of the Homeless. And in the name of the many helpless sufferers whom they relieve we offer them our gratitude.

GENERAL HUMBERT _Commanding the Third Army of France_

PORTRAIT OF HENRY JAMES

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE ORIGINAL PAINTING]

_HENRY JAMES_

THE LONG WARDS

There comes back to me out of the distant past an impression of the citizen soldier at once in his collective grouping and in his impaired, his more or less war-worn state, which was to serve me for long years as the most intimate vision of him that my span of life was likely to disclose. This was a limited affair indeed, I recognise as I try to recover it, but I mention it because I was to find at the end of time that I had kept it in reserve, left it lurking deep down in my sense of things, however shyly and dimly, however confusedly even, as a term of comparison, a glimpse of something by the loss of which I should have been the poorer; such a residuary possession of the spirit, in fine, as only needed darkness to close round it a little from without in order to give forth a vague phosphorescent light. It was early, it must have been very early, in our Civil War, yet not so early but that a large number of those who had answered President Lincoln’s first call for an army had had time to put in their short period (the first term was so short then, as was likewise the first number,) and reappear again in camp, one of those of their small New England State, under what seemed to me at the hour, that of a splendid autumn afternoon, the thickest mantle of heroic history. If I speak of the impression as confused I certainly justify that mark of it by my failure to be clear at this moment as to how much they were in general the worse for wear--since they can’t have been exhibited to me, through their waterside settlement of tents and improvised shanties, in anything like hospital conditions. However, I cherish the rich ambiguity, and have always cherished it, for the sake alone of the general note exhaled, the thing that has most kept remembrance unbroken. I carried away from the place _the_ impression, the one that not only was never to fade, but was to show itself susceptible of extraordinary eventual enrichment. I may not pretend now to refer it to the more particular sources it drew upon at that summer’s end of 1861, or to say why my repatriated warriors were, if not somehow definitely stricken, so largely either lying in apparent helplessness or moving about in confessed languor: it suffices me that I have always thought of them as expressing themselves at almost every point in the minor key, and that this has been the reason of their interest. What I call the note therefore is the characteristic the most of the essence and the most inspiring--inspiring I mean for consideration of the admirable sincerity that we thus catch in the act: the note of the quite abysmal softness, the exemplary genius for accommodation, that forms the alternative aspect, the passive as distinguished from the active, of the fighting man whose business is in the first instance formidably to bristle. This aspect has been produced, I of course recognise, amid the horrors that the German powers had, up to a twelvemonth ago, been for years conspiring to let loose upon the world by such appalling engines and agencies as mankind had never before dreamed of; but just that is the lively interest of the fact unfolded to us now on a scale beside which, and though save indeed for a single restriction, the whole previous illustration of history turns pale. Even if I catch but in a generalising blur that exhibition of the first American levies as a measure of experience had stamped and harrowed them, the signally attaching mark that I refer to is what I most recall; so that if I didn’t fear, for the connection, to appear to compare the slighter things with the so much greater, the diminished shadow with the far-spread substance, I should speak of my small old scrap of truth, miserably small in contrast with the immense evidence even then to have been gathered, but in respect to which latter occasion didn’t come to me, as having contained possibilities of development that I must have languished well-nigh during a lifetime to crown it with.