Chapter V: Thundery Weather

Two months later the _rapprochement_ of Russia and Japan was a _fait accompli_; and at the same time a new 18,000,000 Chinese loan was on the counters of the Deutsche-Asiatische Bank.

At this thing England, as it were, started! The Banque de l’Indo-Chine had some under-part in the handling of the loan—but no British, no American, syndicate. And immediately a feeling of unease ran through our land.

It was as when wild-fowl in flight foreknow tempests from the puffy fuffs and the scent of thunder, and ten thousand outcries of fright are drowned within the row of rising winds.

Queer things seemed at work in the world, purposes, symptoms, like thieves’ feet creaking in corridors at midnight, causing one to finger one’s trigger. But as to their meaning, the scheme had been too subtly plotted for any mind to construct the pieces in the right sequence. The Prince of Wales wrote to the Queen from Queensferry: “Things seem singular to me, though I don’t quite see what’s what. Why should the Mikado wish to rush like this into Russia’s arms?”

It was on the morning of the 11th of October that a Peking telegram of Reuter’s Special Service asserted that Germany had been offered the lease of the Shantung Peninsula as guarantee, on similar terms as Kiao-Chow, Port Arthur, Wei-hai-Wei, and Mirs Bay.

“Never,” said Manchester and the City.

“But yes,” said Potsdam through the _Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung_.

So it was true? In an apparently inspired article _The Times_ declared that if China was going to be partitioned in this fashion, then the Yangtse Valley was due to England. Upon which Russia, France, clapped hand to dirk against Germany, against England, against vague Fate. The heads of men commenced to dizzy in the chaos and uncertainty of contradictory interests, the whirl of forces working of themselves. A Polar Ocean was breaking up: but as to how the masses might range themselves in the crash the Creator alone knew.

The world had as yet no Government. Each nation had: but the planet was an Anarchy, a rabble of nations without arrangement or police, where each might murder, cheat, or steal at its own sweet will.

For fifty years Germany had conceived the idea that she needed “colonies”: she did not need any “_colonies_”: but the fact that she passionately imagined that she did was an urgent fact which a world-Government would have looked to.

Everywhere in her frenzy for “_colonies_” she had been blocked. Did she look toward Brazil?—there was the Monroe Doctrine. Did she dream of cotton-fields waving over Asia Minor?—eight million Magyars, chattering an Asiatic language, ranged themselves against her peaceful penetration of the Near East.

When she aimed at the Germanisation of Trieste and Fiume as “outlets,” a handful of Croatian Slavs under Hungarian and Italian influence waxed angry. When she wished to win the goodwill of Galicia and the Austrian Poles by soft-soaping the Poles of Posen, Petersburg impeded the eastward eagle of Teutonic ideas and capital by going one better in benevolence to her own Poles.

Her “Drang Nach Osten” toward Constantinople, Syria, Mesopotamia was blocked by the Balkan States. Her vision of an Austro-German Empire washed by the North-Sea was a vision still—the “Balance of Power” blocked her.

What, then, was the good of that mass of army toeing the globe with challenging eye, chin up, of that weight of navy big with child, whose expense kept the spectre of bankruptcy ever at her elbow?

Whether her own fault or Fate’s, it could not last! She was poor for nothing! Her red-hot energies raged like men fighting in a fire in a nightmare,—and for nothing! she was bewitched, she was stung with the tarantula, she danced frantically, and no locomotion, she swelled monstrously, and not with porridge, but with dropsy.

It could not last—she was too ’cute, and not wise enough, too strong, and not great enough.

In these very days of the Russo-Japanese _rapprochement_, of the loan, and of the question of Shantung, hot rancour was in her heart at the withdrawals of capital by Paris and London, large selling orders, and drop in securities. She was poor still!

But Shantung seemed luscious to her—a piece of luck to be seized; and the Kaiser made a dinner-speech. He was a neurotic character, who ranted, and had Anglophobia—and the Heir-Apparent still more! though our Queen had fixed upon his sister, the Princess Elizabeth, to be the wife of our “Teddy.” He was said to have some ability—was then a ship’s-commodore.

The German High Seas Fleet was thereupon recalled from Autumn Manœuvres on the Norway coast; our First and Fourth Destroyer Flotillas were operating with specific orders about the Orkneys and North Sea; submarines were on the watch at Lamlash; the First and Second Battle and Cruiser Squadrons were mobilised about Queensferry and Cromarty. There was a rumour that they were being cleared for action. Twice in five days there were meetings of the Cabinet. Bread had gone up a penny a quartern.

The French First Line of Defence was mobilising in Toulon Harbour; three brigades of Zouaves from North Africa had landed at Marseilles.

In the midst of which world-turmoil, how perplexing the news, flashed by a New York Herald correspondent, that the new Kotohito Ministry had promised the Diet enormous economies in the Naval Estimates—a drop of two hundred and fifty million yen (25,000,000 sterling)!

The Chancellor’s speech had dwelt upon the cordial relations of Japan with all nations, upon her poverty, upon the immorality of the monstrous armaments of modern man...!

Did Japan, then, no longer need a navy? Was the outlandish yellow ally of England failing her in the hour of need?

Wire on wire! like lightnings winking here, there, here, when the weather is weird, and peewits wheel and wail....

But on the afternoon of the 22nd the Under-Secretary, Sir B. S. Gilbert, stated in the Commons that the situation was still not beyond the skill of diplomats; for if Germany would but leave unfettered the land-taxes and Custom-dues of Shantung, which furnished part of the source of repayment of the last British loan, a _modus vivendi_ might yet be discovered. And that night London went to bed with a quieter mind. Many gales had gathered, and had passed again.

But three terrible days of strain followed, in which Whitehall waited for a reply from Wilhelm-Strasse, and none arrived....

And on the fourth day an intense interest took hold upon Englishmen at the rumour of a most singular meeting—at Königsberg—between the Tsar, the Kaiser, their two Foreign Ministers, and Mons. Cambertin of the Quai d’Orsay.

When England gathered that France was there in the conference, she said: “And you, too...?”

The old “Entente Cordiale” was a phrase of the earlier years of the century; but its spirit, one hoped, lived. France stood for Light, England for Good-will: if they two fought, then the Kingdom of God was divided against itself.

And, if they fought—with Morocco now “a second France”—Gibraltar was useless, Suez blocked, Malta gone—especially if Spain was with the Continentals. For, with Tarifa fortified on one side of the Straits, and on the other Tangier, the heights of Gibel Musa, and the low-lying dunes by Ceuta bristling with batteries, then the Mediterranean Fleet was in prison.

How would France go, if it was war, in truth, at last? That was the question now. Would her larger light fail her, her world-instinct, and temptation prevail with her? Rumours, rumours, flew from agitated lip to agitated lip. _The Daily Mail_ had information that Germany, in her urgency to attract the alliance of France, was lavishing the wildest offers—Alsace-Lorraine! a whole North-African Empire! _The Telegraph_ gave it that the Persian Gulf, India, Manchuria, Mongolia were to go to Russia. It was reported that crowds were daily ranging about Berlin singing old Schneckenburger’s _Wacht am Rhein_; that in the _bureaux_ of the British Ambassadors at Berlin, at Petersburg, were already declarations of war.

And if Russia was going, must not France, too, go with the powers of darkness? The Franco-Russian Alliance, indeed, had lapsed; but its habit and leaning persisted. In which case, England stood alone to sink or swim with America? who might have enough to handle west and south? For all saw that, if it was war at last, then it was war world-wide and final, to terminate in a new earth, and a new look of the skies.