Chapter III: Treitschke and the Professors 230 (5)

In literature, written in French, Brussels is to Paris something as Dublin is to London. The same gibes at the “Brussels Brogue,” the same uneasy and all but indignant tremor when a great Belgian writer steps on the scene, the same grudged applause, finally the same adulation. It is a notable fact that most of the Belgians who have planted conquering banners in French literature are of Flemish stock--Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Rodenbach, Cammaerts. Their imagination is coloured by two traditions. Of Maeterlinck one need say nothing. Verhaeren is certainly one of our supreme living poets, perhaps the supreme poet of our civilisation. Rodenbach, more local, is for ever part of the beauty and sadness of Bruges. Cammaerts is known by his exquisite songs. Camille Lemonnier, the painter and author, is perhaps the most vital and abundant representative of the Walloon stream of influence.

* * * * *

Such is an inadequate outline, a cinema survey of the work and the place of Belgian in time of peace. Such was the little, great nation that William the Treaty-Breaker has violated and ravaged. When one remembers it all--memory on golden memory, remembers the black ruins where a year ago men laboured and prayed at peace with other men, remembers the slow building-up and the sudden devastation, eighty years gone in a fortnight--does not the heart harden against these metaphysical barbarians of Prussia? Belgium to-day is the most illustrious evicted tenant of modern history. But, her enemies put down, she will return. _Vive la Belgique!_

“G.H.Q.”

There is a certain magic in initial letters, and they seem to be most magical when they run in trinities. Who has not heard of the G.O.M. and B.M.G and A.B.C. and G.B.S. and that R.I.P. which has a richer gloom than even Raleigh’s forlorn _Hic Jacet_? But in this war the greatest of all is G.H.Q.

G.H.Q. stands for General Headquarters, known to most newspaper readers as the place where the telegrams come from to depress or to cheer us. But they have a great deal more to do at G.H.Q. than merely to receive messages from the fighting front, and to send them home. Having had the privilege of paying a visit there within the last ten days, I can realise that fact with the vivid actuality of a thing seen. If the Commander-in-Chief and his General Staff are the brain of an army, cerebellum and cerebrum, G.H.Q. supplies its nervous and motor system. Nerves, efferent and afferent, carrying in thrills of sensation and carrying out waves of movement to the extreme limits of the military organism, muscles in association with the nerves--these make up G.H.Q.

Let me detail some of its activities.

When you export an army you have got to export with it a government. Our army in France is to all intents and purposes a colony in arms, with a purely male population larger than the total population of New Zealand. G.H.Q. is at once its Westminster and its War Office; its railway--from booking-office to clearing-house--and its Bank; its Scotland Yard and its Harley Street; its tinker, tailor, butcher, baker and candlestick-maker.

In Pantheistic philosophies all things issue from a central principle, and all return to it. G.H.Q. is the Om of the East, the Absolute of that cloudy rhetorician from Berlin whom we used to call a philosopher, Hegel. Without G.H.Q. nothing; with G.H.Q. everything.

It is not a bad description of war to say that it consists in carrying heavy things from one place to another, and that victory depends on carrying them faster and more efficiently than the enemy. The heavy things may be soldiers, rifles, bully beef, howitzers, cartridges, hospital appliances, shells, or a score of other things indispensable. That is the reason why the first aspect of war that impresses one is transportation. From London to the front there is a line of troop trains, transports and convoys, linked together very nigh as closely as the boats in a pontoon bridge. Behind the whole of the front every road, railway and canal is scheduled.

On any road traffic must proceed in only one prescribed direction. If by any mischance you find yourself heading the other way, the first military policeman will very abruptly let you know all about it.

A line, at once elastic and unbreakable, carries our resolve from the centre of formation here to the point of contact in the trenches. It goes _ohne Hast_ and _ohne Rast_, to borrow Teutonisms that were once more popular than they are likely ever to be again. No hurry, but no intermission of effort, that is the motto and practice of G.H.Q. The picturesque, bloody and heroic phases of war are praised everywhere and fire the imagination. But consider to yourself how our army would get on without its Carter Paterson! Its Carter Paterson is G.H.Q.

G.H.Q. has got to see that things are carried, and it sees that they are. The foolish French Minister of War told a misled nation in 1870 that there was not a button missing from the gaiter of a soldier. That boast, so mad and disastrous, is to-day for our Expeditionary Force the “frigid and calculated” truth. The soldiers say to you all over the lines: “Anything you send arrives. Nothing goes wrong.” There are many others to praise as well as the Olympians of G.H.Q.--the chauffeur mending his tyre with lyrical profanity _faute de mieux_, the mechanic sweating behind the scenes at Boulogne or Calais, Mr. Tennant, Lord Kitchener--but, without G.H.Q. nothing.

They clothe themselves with all varieties of function. There is the A.G. (Adjutant-General), who does everything, and, when he gets tired, does something else for a change. There is the I.O. (Intelligence Officer), who sees that every visitor is passed through an infinite succession of sieves, lest he should prove to be a spy. There is the Provost-Marshal, the Chairman of the Prison Commissioners of the Battlefield. There is the Chief Engineer. There is the R.A.M.C. There is the Casualty Clearing Station. There is the Field Cashier. There is the R.T.O. (Railway Transportation Officer), who, if he does not like the look of you, sets you emulating Puck in the rapidity of your return. There is... What is there not?

G.H.Q. is an army, a government, an administration, a literature. You see those who wield its sceptre going about a French provincial town, yawning down deserted boulevards strewn with the debris of autumn, smoking in bare French rooms with green jalousies, always unperturbed, always efficient, always courteous, generally bored. You see them walking arm-in-arm, or in the saddle, knee to knee, with French staff officers, maintaining and deepening the Alliance. Some of them have tunics beribboned with the record of five campaigns; some are raw boys; but, all together, they keep the fight going. They are the Business Organisers of the war.

Now that the news of our advance is coming hotly in, they will praise bullets and bayonets. Mike O’Leary’s and General Fochs; but when one comes to think of it, it is hard on G.H.Q. that the patient, continuous infallibility which had not yet left a section, or even an individual soldier, short of bread, beef, cartridges or medical care should be left out of the picture.

“ZUR ERINNERUNG”

A LETTER TO AN AUSTRIAN FELLOW-STUDENT

_In Unconquered France_

MY DEAR FRANZ,

That was the familiar device you wrote in the book you gave me when twelve years ago we drank our final Bruderschaft at Innsbruck station. I was saying good-bye to your Alpenrose, your Rose of the Alps, where the great mountains spring up their ten and fourteen thousand feet out of the very pavements, where the Golden Roof glitters over its antique arcades, where the great bronze warriors guard the sleep of your Emperor Max, where Andreas Hofer fought the good fight against an imperial tyrant, where inns, old before the French Revolution, all but touch gables across the narrow, immemorial _gassen_. You wanted me to remember all that, but most of all, I think, you wanted me to remember the quiet valleys, full of colour and peace, the red cupolaed churches where we went to Mass at four o’clock of a Sunday morning, the mountains we conquered together, with their summit air that we thought better than wine, until we came back, leg-weary if heart-high, in the evening to drink your thin country vintage, and applaud the zither-players and the amazing Tyrolese dancers. When I was last in your Tyrol I did not see you, Franz: you had gone to Berlin to study philology, that characteristic pseudo-science which Nietzsche and your Prussians have transformed into a seed-bed of criminal philosophies.

Those good days of our youth are worse than dead, a rivulet lost in the salt sea of estrangement that has engulfed so many friendships and so much happiness. We have other things to remember. Two years ago your Austria drove a sword into the heart of Europe. The agony of simple men then initiated still continues. I wonder where that damnable, recurrent date found you this midsummer? Fighting against that _Italia irredenta_ with which you used to sympathise so generously? Falling back before that Russia which you used to agree with me in regarding as the chosen home of great novels and profound religion? In the lines against France, that France which shaped and nourished the soul of every free soul in Teutondom--and they have not been many--from Heine to your own tragic Empress? There is another possibility which I had almost forgotten. No Man’s Land, or, as one had better call it, Dead Man’s Land, is no great width at the point we hold. Just as I am here swallowing chalk and clay, consorting with rats and lesser forms of obscene life, mixing with wounds and blood, so may you be over there. I look across the long grass, lush with disintegrating corpses, and imagine that Prussia may have laid hold of you for other pursuits than philology. Perhaps it is you whose machine-gun taps every night like a devil-ridden typewriter against this particular area of our parapet?

You will agree with me, even now, that war, if not Hell, is cousin to it, cousin German. To condemn humanity to pass through that chamber of torture is a decision so grave and terrible that even emperors might well tremble before it. In the lineaments of the obscurest man slain in battle stands written the judgment of the rulers of the earth. Can your Austria face her conscience? I know that at the question you will be disposed to parry with a gibe at “English self-righteousness.” But, as it happens, I am not English, and mere self-righteousness does not survive the ordeal of battle. Living through this nightmare of blood you cannot but ask yourself how it began. The diplomatic correspondence is there to answer the question. These documents, the most memorable in secular history, are the charter of justification behind every decree of death that passes from the Allied lines to yours. Your Austria had grounds, tragical grounds, of complaint against some Serbians: you sought not justice, but the destruction of Serbian independence. You leagued yourself with Prussia--that blood-and-iron-monger--to break the faith of Europe and the homes of Belgium. You have heard all this before? You will hear it again, till the end of time. Not all the babbling savants of Berlin can ever erase the record of those two bully’s blows. They are the Alpha and the Omega of the war. Of course, it is true that there were other forces behind this reversion to violence and barbarism. All the explosive sediment of history was behind it, but it was your touch on the trigger that released all that imprisoned damnation.

Your natural place was not with Prussia. You, who were once the master, are now the valet of Germanism. You had not elaborated through forty years a religion of murder. Like us Irish, you were perhaps more fascinating than successful; you were a nation of gentlemen. You had grace, delicacy and honour. You listened to the crowned commercial traveller from Potsdam, who promised you a short war and a golden guerdon of trade. We know now that it was he who forced your hand in the Serbian negotiations. To be allured by such a bribe is no new sin in our experience; every nation of the Alliance, at some time or other in the bad past, has fallen in similar wise. Does it seem to you that Mephistopheles is in the way of keeping his promise? I notice in your newspapers that your people are impressed by the area of enemy territory you occupy. The present truth of the military situation is that you occupy only as a detected burglar “occupies” the house he has attempted to rifle--that is to say, pending the arrival of the police. And, Franz, the police, although as usual somewhat slow, have arrived. There is no doubt of that.

It seems to me quite candidly that the time has come to separate Habsburg from Hohenzollern. We are willing to believe that you acted under duress. During the war you have not befouled your name beyond forgiveness: no Cavell or Fryatt looms up in judgment against you. Your base and cynical over-lord, having compelled you to a gamble in blood, now begins to exhibit the nakedness of soul of every cut-throat cut-purse who finds that he has caught a Tartar. I do not know that any deep hatred of Austria is nourished by anyone in the Allied countries who understands the inner economy of the Central Empires. A _locus pœnitentiæ_ will not be refused you. Come back to the civilisation to which you belong. Make it possible for me once again to renew our old Bruderschaft in Innsbruck, and to rejoice together that the Twilight of the Gods of Cruelty has deepened into enduring night.

SILHOUETTES FROM THE FRONT

I.--THE WAY TO THE TRENCHES

They have a saying among the followers of Mohammed, “Shun him who has thrice made the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Holy City! His conversation is an offence.” It is, indeed, the vice of travellers that they will talk. No man is safe from us if only we have been anywhere he has not been--from Birr, as the song says, to Bareilly. But the temptation of the trenches is the most formidable of all. Who has resisted it? Raw and ripe we have each of us tried to daub his own picture of that amazing fact, of the strange shifts and incredible devisings to which civilised nations have been forced to resort in order to save civilisation. One brush will add a stroke that escapes another. All the brushes and books, and all the cinema films together will never come near the reality. That is the sole rationale of these thumb-nail silhouettes.

If you were to ask any patron of the present Continental tour for his first impression, he would probably note the excellence of the travelling arrangements. Tickets are free, or rather they are not necessary. It is impossible to miss your train: the columns of them thunder without haste and without rest from the remotest station back at home to the ultimate railhead where their thunder dies in that of the guns. The sea-lacunæ are obliterated by an all but unbroken bridge of untorpedoed transports. Delays due to loss of luggage are unknown. You may, indeed, lose your luggage, but you do not delay. There are no tips on this journey, and it would be idle to book seats in advance. An avoidable expense, for you will get there without them. Either with a draft, a post of minor importance but yet of some; or with your battalion in all the pomp and circumstance of war; or, likely enough, in these latter days as an isolated officer reinforcement with a typed telegram and a moving order, you will arrive. Of course there are incidental divagations. With traffic rigidly scheduled and regulated as it must be, an occasional traveller is to be found who has lost his way and has perhaps accomplished ten kilometres between dawn and dusk. I met one such, and said--

“You seem to have lost your unit?”

“Lost my unit?” he replied with intense rancour. “I have lost my company, lost my battalion, lost my brigade, lost my division, my corps. A little more and I shall have lost the b----y British Expeditionary Force.”

Indubitably it is the perfection of transportation. Napoleon said, or is supposed to have said, that an army, like a snake, moves on its belly. The truth is, of course, that the art of war is, as to six-sevenths of it, the art of carrying heavy things from one place to another. You have got to move obvious necessaries, such as food and fuel and housing-timber and spare clothes; and human frames--that to marching men are heavier at the end of a long day than anything in the world; and rifles, bayonets and bombs, the ultimate _ratio decidendi_ of all operations; and shells that look like death, and weigh as much as a model bungalow; and frowning Frankensteins of guns that look like the Day of Judgment, and weigh as much as a small foundry; and the wounded who come back with the Cross, steeped in blood, to stand as a fit symbol of their sacrifice. But you must move a great deal that is less obvious and more necessary. When you export an army such as ours, which is in reality a nation and not a small one, you must send with it a government. Now knowledge, and the administrative body in which it expresses itself, is of all things the most difficult to export. This scheme of transportation is the first miracle of sheer brain-power that strikes you, but it is not the greatest. I do not scruple to say that as a study in government, that is to say, in the efficient conduct of human things in the mass, the present army, as organised through G.H.Q., is far more impressive than most civil constitutions.

I do not speak merely of the actual Higher Command. Your heads of that must carry all the apparatus of all its range from minor tactics to military statesmanship. Note, rather, then, when you send an army you must send a Treasury, a General Post Office, a Judiciary and Record Office, and one hardly knows what beside. Your quartermaster-general has got to be the Selfridge of six million gaily grumbling customers, who are perpetually on the move. A mere battalion quartermaster must possess qualities that would win a fortune in a large suburban shop.

And it is possible to overlook the service of information--the signallers. Everywhere the army goes it lays behind it a tentacular network of news-carrying wire. The arm of its reporting power is indefinitely longer than that of any Associated Press. From the company dug-out in the front trench to Sir Douglas Haig, and from him to Whitehall, there is no gap. On the earth, beneath it and above, this nerve-system extends: aeroplane, observation balloon, patrol, vedette, sniping-post, all collect their varying toll of fact and surmise; electricity, drilled to the use of the men who wear the blue-and-white bands, vibrates it on to its destination. And so is this particular area of the army cerebrum kept alive and alert. I have hardly spoken of the A.S.C., of the endless chain of supply that for ever runs and returns on its infallible cogs about the roads and railways.

There are other, many other, things to admire as patterns of organisation. It is what our subalterns, with their strict and shy economy of speech, describe as a “great show.” All the world has heard of carrying on. But it was first of all necessary to carry. And we have carried to war across the seas not a mere army, but a people in arms.

II.--THE LONG ENDURANCE

In the history of war, especially as it was practised by the Irish regiments, we have been accustomed to the brief ecstasy of assault, the flash of bayonets, the headlong avalanche of death and victory.... Often there had been, before this sharp decision, the heroism of a long march. But in general, instantaneity had been the characteristic of Irish soldiers as it is of Irish football forwards. There are instances enough of the old quality in this war from Festubert to Suvla Bay, from Loos to that shell-powdered sinister terrain over which the Ulster Division swept in its great charges. But there is another heroism. The three chapters of this war may well bear for rubrics: the Grim Retreat, the Long Endurance, the Epic Push. It is of the second that I write here.

Note that this, the greatest, is also the dullest of all recorded campaigns. It is wrong, indeed, to call it a campaign or even a series of campaigns: one had better style it the Wall-paper War. Everywhere the same type and development of fighting, the same pattern repeated and indefinitely repeated. It is true that the walls are the walls of the world, and the colours are those of life and death. None the less the effect on the mind is that of near bigness, which is always of its nature wearisome. It is not of that weariness of the detached mind that I now write, but of the more intimate and crushing fatigue of the actual man on the spot. There may very well be units of this immense army that on their return home will have apparently little to show for their lost blood.

People will say to them--

“I suppose you were in the dash at X? No? Oh, it was the capture of Y? I mean, of course, the round-up at Z?”

And they will answer rather dully--

“No. We just held on. We are the lot that just stuck to A, and weren’t shifted out of B.”

And the response will be a disappointed and belittling “Oh yes!”

But, when it is understood, this long endurance will be seen to be something very notable in itself, and, more than that, an essential element in the slow and great victory. Movements are picturesque, but in order that something should move it was necessary that something should stand still. The ends of a lever move effectively only when it is based on an unmoving fulcrum. If the rivet of a scissors did not stand fast, the blades would cut little. And the tale of the units to whom it came merely to hold the line is the great tale.

In the trenches it is the day-by-dayness that tells and tries. It is always the same tone of duty: certain days in billets, certain days in reserve, certain days in the front trench. One is reminded of those endless chains by which some well-buckets are worked, except that nothing or very little ever seems to come up in the bucket to pay the labour of turning. General Joffre as grignotard is one of the phrase-makers of the war. But this nibbling process works both ways. We nibble; they nibble. They are nibbled; we are nibbled. A few casualties every turn, another grating of the saw-teeth of death and disease, and before very long a strong unit is weak. And, of course, the nerve-strain is not slight. Everybody going up to the trenches from the C. O. down to the last arrival in the last draft knows it to be moral certainty that there are two or three that will not march back. Everybody knows that it may be anybody. In the trenches death is random, illogical, devoid of principle. One is shot not on sight, but on blindness, out of sight. You feel that a man who is hit has had worse luck than a golfer whose opponent holes out in one at a blind hole. Yet these things do happen. Very few people are hit by lightning, and in a storm it is a comfort to remember this. But some people are hit by lightning. Here one is in a place where a very trivial piece of geographical bad luck may be fatal. There is much to nibble the nerves.

One likes to image this whole task of holding the line under the image of a sentry-group. This is not to depreciate any other man or any other function. From colonel down all the world here has the same job. The sentry-group is the symbol. A figure in khaki stands on the shelf of fire-bag, his steel helmet forming a serious bulge over the parapet as he peers through the night towards the German lines. His comrade sits on the shelf beside him waiting to help, to report, to carry the gas-alarm, the alarm of an attack. Over there in front across No Man’s Land there are shell-holes and unburied men. Strange things happen there. Patrols and counter-patrols come and go. There are two sinister fences of barbed wire, on the barbs of which blood-stained strips of uniform and fragments more sinister have been known to hang uncollected for a long time. The air is shaken with diabolical reverberations; it is stabbed with malign illumination as the Véry lights shoot up, broaden to a blaze, and go out. This contrast of night and light and gloom is trying to the eyes. The rifle-grenades and trench-mortars, flung at short range, that scream through the air are trying to the ears. They may drop a traverse away, and other men not charged for the moment with his duty may seek shelter. But not he. Strange things issue from No Man’s Land, and the eyes of the army never close or flinch. And so, strained, tense and immovable he leans and looks forward into the night of menace.

But the trench has not fallen. As for him, he carried his pack for Ireland and Europe, and now pack-carrying is over.

He has held the line.

III.--RHAPSODY ON RATS

What first strikes one in a trench is, contrary to report, not the Rat but the Slat. A trench-board is a sort of ladder, laid horizontally along a ditch of ill repute, and the rungs of this ladder are the slats. It is true that if this ladder were set upright it would be impossible to climb it, for the slats are too close together. Nevertheless, it has the form and aspirations of a ladder, and yearns towards the vertical. To follow the windings of the trench, this board is of necessity made in short sections. Now, one often enters a trench in the dark. Certain short boards have been displaced by the outgoing unit. An incautious foot, with, say, fifteen stone avoirdupois behind it, is set on one end, and the perpendicular ambition of the trench-board manifests itself in a jarring wallop of the other end on one’s tin hat. The slat decidedly strikes you.

It is unpleasant to walk on, as anybody who has ever laboriously evaded coal-cellar gratings will realise. It exists in numbers that have never been counted. You can walk from the North Sea to the foot-hills of the Alps with the soles of your boots continuously beslatted, save where there is an odd broken board which there has not been time to repair. At the end of the war there will probably be slat-excursions organised by American tourist companies--they are said to have already purchased the ground--with the privilege to each pilgrim of removing one slat as a souvenir. What is to be said for them is that they stand between you and a flounder along the bottom mud. In winter, when the drainage improvisations prove false, and the fighting ditches run hip-high, the foothold is to be valued. And now as to the rats.

Ratavia, as one may designate it, resembles China in that there has never been a census of its population, but that it approximates to the mathematical infinite. They are everywhere--large rats, small rats, bushy rats, shy rats and impudent, with their malign whiskers, their obscene eyes, loathsome all the way from overlapping teeth to kangaroo tail. You see them on the parades and the shelter-roofs at night, slinking along on their pestiferous errands. You lie in your dug-out, famished, not for food (that goes without saying), but for sleep, and hear them scurrying up and down their shafts, nibbling at what they find, dragging scraps of old newspapers along, with intolerable cracklings, to bed themselves. They scurry across your blankets and your very face. Nothing suppresses their numbers. Not dogs smuggled in in breach of regulations. Not poison, which most certainly ought not to be used. Not the revolver-practice in which irritated subalterns have been known to indulge. Men die and rats increase.

I see just one defence that they can make: it was not they who invaded our kingdom, but we who invaded theirs. We descended, we even dug ourselves down to their level. It is true that in our heroic moments we may style the trenches the New Catacombs to which freedom descended for a while to return in triumph. But it is also true that they are rat-holes, rat-avenues, rat-areas. The dramatic translation of an old period was called “The Birds”; the dramatisation of this must be called “The Rats.” Strangely enough, it has been left for me to tell the decisive chapter of the inner history of the war. Kaiser Wilhelm, whose resemblance to a rat has been too little noticed--you have but to take the wax out of his moustache and allow it to droop--was seated in his ugly palace at Potsdam, considering his ultimatum to Serbia, when there suddenly appeared before him, down the chimney or out of some diplomatic orifice in the panelling, a Rat, the master and pattern of all rats. “Majesty!” said he, “I am come to offer you my aid in this war which you are planning. As you are the Emperor of all the Germans, so am I the Emperor of all the Rats. Our interests coincide.”

They conferred together very shrewdly, and struck an alliance. “Good!” said his Majesty, slapping his thigh. “It is decided. We are with-one-another-firmly-united. The war will begin forthwith.”

So the great quintessential Super-Rat, the Rattish _Ding an sich_, left to mobilise his forces, and the Kaiser drew over a sheet of paper and wrote the magical and black word that unlocks Hell. And the great rat called in his Austria, which is the louse, and his Turkey, which is the sand-flea, and his Bulgaria, which is that porter of poison, the fly. So the battle was joined between the clean and the obscene.

It must be said for the Kaiser that with this one ally he kept faith. Ratavia has increased enormously in population and prosperity. It has suffered from no menace of famine, for Wilhelm, the faith-keeper, has even sacrificed his own subjects generously in order to avert that calamity.

But the end is not yet. The Emperor of the Rats will come once again to Potsdam.

“Majesty!” he will say. “I am a student of Treitschke, who teaches that an alliance is to be kept by the stronger of two associates only as long as his profit lies that way.” And as Majesty, shrivelled, decaying with the pallor of death on him, trembles in his chair the Great Rat will add--

“I propose to annex you.”

THE NEW FRANCE

Madame Caillaux, who was formerly an actress, has achieved in real life her most remarkable dramatic success. Like Emerson’s Lexington farmer, she has certainly fired a shot heard round the world. The assassination of a great political editor by the wife of a powerful minister has recalled to us in a lurid flash the monstrous vanities and violences that raven behind the polite exterior of civilisation. It has given a good many other editors a peg on which to hang a new array of reproachful platitudes. But its effect on the immediate course of politics in France is likely to be of trivial importance. There will be a loud momentary splash, and a wide-going rush of ripples, but it will be found to have been no more than a stone flung into a river already swollen and hurrying to an ambiguous issue. Personal scandals and tragedies are not allowed to disturb that battle of ideas which is the essential life of the Republic. It will be noted that Madame Caillaux’ automatic pistol did not purchase for her husband a respite of even twenty hours. The day following, M. Barthou brought the attack into the Chamber to a head by reading the letter of M. Fabre, the Public Prosecutor; the Rochette enquiry has been not delayed, but expedited, and the electoral struggle comes on with even more headlong rapidity. Making all discount for the error of vision, characteristic of the foreign observer, we are able to say with assurance that the programmes submitted for the approaching election mark the most serious attempt made since the war of 1870 to re-establish France in her traditions.

One may aptly compare France, as a contemporary compared Parnell, to a granite rock overlaid with a shallow drift of detritus. In politics, especially in Parliament, the most distracting flurries of dust succeed and displace one another with a sort of constant inconstancy. Penetrate them, and you come upon an economic and social fabric characterised by massive stability. Nobody who bears this in mind will be blinded by whatever chances to be the latest sand-storm. _La nouvelle France_ was not abolished by the political manœuvre that placed M. Doumergue at the head of the State. It remains, and it grows stronger. This new France means the birth into the moral order of Europe of a fresh and strong reality. What had been for many years a mere vision, glimmering through banked clouds, has become a tangible and habitable fact. The election of President Poincaré, accepted on all sides as the token of a profound change of spirit, has not in its results belied the prophets. Now, beyond all doubt, deference must be paid to the tradition which regards the French as an instantaneous, and, so to say, hair-trigger people. Formulæ seem to change as rapidly as fashions; and the possibility of return to a period of Saturday-to-Monday ministers has not yet been banished to the limbo of the ridiculous. Allowance must be made for the swiftness, the genius for falling into line, the brief passions of unanimity so “temperamental” to the Republic. But at the end of the account the change has lost nothing of its impressiveness. It is a true, not a false dawn.

M. Poincaré stands for many things: it is no mere flourish of words to say that through him France heard and obeyed the call of her past. She deliberately reverted to her origins, and her traditional sources of strength. The new France put itself to school to old France. Intellect, family tradition, gracious manners, thrift, minute industry, a certain austere discipline of thought, and with all that an immense cheerfulness, able to _ça ira_ itself out of any desperate pass--such was _la douce France_ of M. René Bazin and of history. The folly must not be imputed to me of supposing that the election of President Poincaré restored, or will restore, that submerged world. But that is the atmosphere evoked by his personality. The good M. Dupont and that amiable plumpness, M. Durand, being of the earth earthy, and of Latin earth into the bargain, are in no danger of being transformed into angels of light. They will wink and chuckle as before over their dominoes and their aperitives; they will try to anticipate each other with the latest ambiguity of the comic paper and the vaudeville. But they are none the less conscious of the new orientation, and they adapt themselves to it with a purr of satisfaction. The lines on which reconstruction proceeds are in the nature of things that are inevitable. Patriotism is once more in fashion: were Hervé to revive his brilliant dream of planting the tricolour on the dunghill he would run some risk of being planted there himself. It is, no doubt, unfortunate that the national idea should in our day find expression universally in the increasing diversion of capital from productive industry to unproductive armaments. Signs are not lacking that the excess, or rather the frenzied debauch of which Europe has in this regard been guilty, has created an impossible situation. The so-called “strike of capital” even indicates that the point has been reached at which the disease must either generate its own cure, or else kill the patient. But while your ten competitors are arming more and more heavily, it is foolish to stand in your shirt chanting the praises of a millennium which obstinately refuses to arrive. France has accepted the Three Years’ Service Law; and it is certain that no ministry of the near future will dare to repeal that measure. This increase of the army by fifty per cent. is expensive: it is a defeat for the party of reason, if you will, and a triumph for that of violence. But it is an act of sacrifice rendered necessary by events. Any possibility of repeal is ruled out by the opening of old wounds in Alsace-Lorraine. And because the Army Act must stand, the Loan must go through. On that point, doubt is inadmissible: _la nouvelle France_ has made up its mind. The conditions of issue of the new Rente, its immunity or otherwise from taxation, even its amount, are questions in controversy. The discussion on them, so far as it has proceeded, has been of extreme interest as an illustration of French acumen in public finance; it may become a text-book instance in due course, and it might even be studied with profit by the financiers of the new Irish Land Act. The French Treasury has already lost by the delay, but, borrowing in its own market, it will at all events operate on better terms than any of the other borrowing nations, now clamouring for admission to it. But however details may be arranged, the fact that there must be an issue is a thing settled. The new France is, in short, possessed of the spirit of sacrifice. The patriotism that is in fashion is sincere enough to pay the piper from whom it has called the tune.

But it is in the region of ideas, rather than in that of current policy, that we must seek for the key to the future. It would be extravagant to say that the mocking hatred of Christianity has been banished, and that the vendetta against the Church is at an end. Despite M. Briand’s famous _apaisement_ speech, despite the success of M. Poincaré’s “national” programme, the State has not yet returned even to a position of neutrality. But the vivid colour of hope dominates the horizon. Combes-ism is no longer opposed as unjust, it is dismissed as vulgar. The boulevards may not have shed their scepticism, but at all events they recognise religion as one of the ideal forces that make men good citizens and gallant soldiers. As the army recovers its prestige there is a return to the spirit of that strange and burning remonstrance of Alexandre Dumas, the younger--

“Had I been Bazaine” (he wrote), “I would have set up a statue of the Virgin in the midst of my army on the Fifteenth of August--not because it was _Saint Napoleon_ but because it was _Sainte Marie_--and I would have delivered battle against the God whom King William carries about in his pocket, behind whom he speaks like a ventriloquist, and who is not the God of battles, for the very simple reason that there is no God of battles. I would have said to my soldiers: ‘My children, I place the Virgin in your midst. See in her your daughter, your betrothed, your wife, your sister, your mother. Over there is a masked “God” who menaces her with insult. Defend her! Honour her feast with a victory!’ And the Germans would have been defeated. There is, there will always be, in the French soldier something of the Frank of Clovis, something of the Crusader of Saint Louis.”

The essence of truth distilled in that last sentence will more and more impose itself. If soldiers will not fight on an empty stomach, still less will they fight on an empty soul. A shrug, a sensualism, an epigram, and the “lie of religion” is shattered beyond repair: so far, so good. But with religion there has gone the whole category of the ideal. In a world from which all values have been expelled, except the values of appetite, there remains no principle of sacrifice. The only maxim which it is capable of evolving from its own resources is that of egotism, enlightened by prudence; for that _credo_ men will do many things, but they will not die. Such a gospel may for a time be expounded, and even practised, by the noisy minorities who make laws and write books: the anonymous shoulders of the common people are strong enough to carry that and heavier burdens. But the peculiar weakness of any such philosophy is that it has only to be generally accepted in order to become impossible. Egotism and the pleasure-calculus will procure a brief, if not very respectable, ecstasy for the masters, as they loll in their carved and curtained litters, turning over with a languid hand the latest bibelot of selfishness. But let that point of view infect the bearers of the litter, and they will set it down with disturbing roughness. Morality begins where hedonism ends. In France the evolution, whether conducted in the personal consciousness of a master like Bourget, or in the general mind and being, has followed the same curve to the same issue. After Renan there was but one refinement possible: M. Anatole France appeared. But the signs of dissolution have, of late, been accumulating about this specialist in _patchouli_ and paganism. For instance, he has been translated into English. Anatomists like M. Michaut, whose book is one of the literary events of recent years, have made the tour of his philosophy from Dan to Beersheba, and found all barren. Through the _sociologisme_ of writers like Guyau, and the _solidarité_ of writers like Bourgeois, the new France has come back to the old sanities. The experiment of the passing generation consisted essentially in an attempt to live without a brain or a conscience. That experiment, it is curious to note, was pushed to its extreme by an English-writing, French-trained Irishman, Mr. George Moore. It has reached its Vale. A rhapsodist in the last issue of the _Sociological Review_ bewails, but at any rate confesses, the change. It is bad enough that “reactionary” illusions like patriotism should be returning to honour. But when you find University students going to Mass----Going on week-days. And Bergson and mysticism, construed as a tonic of action, setting the fashion.

In the field of politics, as such, the most interesting new fact is the attitude of the Conservatives. For a long time, in the hope of discrediting the Republic, they made it a principle to support not the best but the worst Republican. A gradual process, culminating in the shock of Casablanca and Agadir, has made manifest the hopelessness of such merely negative action, if it could be called action. They have come down into the arena. President Poincaré was their first achievement. The Three Years’ Law of the Barthou Ministry was their second. If at the following elections the ancient apathy and the modern _m’enfichisme_, as it is styled, can be overcome, they will reach the third, and that will be permanent. The five pistol-shots of Madame Caillaux may very well prove to have been the first effective dissipation of a slumber.

The alignment of parties is, at all events, clearer than ever before. On the one side, the Radicals and Radical-Socialists “unified” at Pau. The essential principle and foundation of this group is the existence of a state of war between the friends and enemies of the Republic. The point of view is that of Jacobinism, but for the guillotine of purification there has been substituted the administrative machine. It is understood that the “eating of curates” is the normal occupation of all adherents; but, of course, one appetite will exceed another. The better is the unappeasable enemy of the merely good--

_Un pur trouve toujours un plus pur qui l’épure._

On the other side the new party of appeasement of MM. Briand and Barthou. Its leaders and members have come to it, as to every central position, from different camps and by different routes. Hammered upon from the outside by German aggression, they demand domestic peace as the first condition of national security. They ask for a _république aérée et habitable_. They propose an army strengthened and increased through the sacrifices of the rich and the middle classes. It is a synthesis of Déroulède and Millerand, of militarism and social transformation.

M. Jaurès and his integral Socialists may, of course, be trusted to find their place among the “pacifists.” The late Herr Bebel led the German Social Democrats back to an acceptance of the national idea; but not so M. Jaurès. A strategist at once bold and astute, who has never known the responsibilities of office, to whom _la patrie_ is only a gunmaker’s advertisement, he will almost certainly co-operate with the reorganised _bloc_.

It is for the prophets to tell us what the elections will bring forth. For us, plain onlookers, the life of the most interesting and logical nation in Europe has come to a crisis, the solution of which may notably react not only upon civilisation and humanity--those great abstractions--but upon ourselves, and the little parts we play in each.

THE SOLDIER-PRIESTS OF FRANCE

It makes me a little proud to remember that I was one of the few writers in these countries to announce and celebrate the birth of _la nouvelle France_ long before the coming of the war. For many years the Republic has been in ill repute in the Catholic world. Men thought of her as the home of Renan and scepticism, of Gambetta and anti-clericalism, of Combes--the unspeakable Combes--and persecution, of Anatole France and refined sensualism, of a score of lesser writers and plain pornography. That interpretation of her life was never true although it had elements of truth in it. Even in the old France there were two strains: there was Rabelais as well as Pascal, Montaigne as well as Bossuet, Voltaire as well as St. Francis de Sales. There is, indeed, lodged in the very mind and temper of France a seed of perilous adventure. Her courage is a constant temptation to dally with the blasphemous and the foul: her lucidity--for vague and furtive innuendoes are like a toothache to French style--doubles the offence when she lapses.

But on the other hand there was something peculiarly obnoxious in the circumstance that these attacks on France proceeded in great part from German sources. That there were many splendid Catholics in Germany was of course true. They were strong enough in numbers and organisation to have done something finer than throw themselves into the arms of Prussianism. The failure of the Centre Party in that regard will lie as a heavy cloud on its future. But that German Catholics should have lent themselves, as they did, to a systematic denigration of France in foreign periodicals was contemptible. The truth is that every German in the modern period has become infected with the superstition that he belongs to the chosen race. Matthew Arnold--who, for the rest, did not himself believe very luminously in God--started in these countries the notion that the war of 1870 was, as he called it, the judgment of Judæa on Greece. That a Protestant God should have thus judged a country whose old title was that of “eldest daughter of the Church,” was an interpretation of events peculiarly agreeable to militant Protestants both in England and Germany. But that Catholics should have assimilated such a view was remarkable. It is true that French policy played disastrously into the hands of Bismarck. Gambetta’s error of anti-clericalism led from disintegration to disintegration. Bismarck has left on record statements of his reasons for embarking on the _Kulturkampf_, which for frigid wickedness of purpose cannot be equalled in political literature.

“The laurels of Sadowa and Sedan do not satisfy my ambitions, I have a more glorious mission, that of making myself master of Catholicism.”

“The enemy of Germany is Pontifical Rome. That is the danger which menaces the relations of Germany and France. If France identifies herself with Rome she constitutes herself by that fact alone the sworn enemy of Germany.”

France made her mistakes, but before the war she had begun to correct and cancel them. The gradual return to fair play from the midnight bigotry of Combes to the policy of appeasement of M. Briand, and the execution of that policy by M. Poincaré was very marked in all its stages. And in the measure in which that correction of old mistakes and tyrannies is made, not only in France but under every other Allied Flag, will the coming victory repay the blood that is buying it. But that German Catholics should have held up their country before the world as a shining model, and France as an abandoned and degenerate nation, is a thing intelligible only to those who know the vanity and self-exaltation of the modern German. While they were thus fabling, who really spoke for Germany in the ear of the world? These are the Germans. Schopenhauer with his scientific pessimism, truer indeed and nobler than any light philosophy of pleasure, but profoundly anti-Christian. Treitschke, who taught that the State is above all moral laws. A line of theologians from Strauss to Harnack and his contemporaries, who claimed to have shredded into mere rags of myth the historical beginning of the Christian faith and fold. Nietzsche, who “transcended morality” for the individual as Treitschke had done for the State, and preached pride, pleasure and domination as the cardinal virtues. Nietzsche who wrote--

“They have said to you: Happy are the peaceful! but I say to you: Happy are the warriors, for they shall be called not the sons of Jehovah, but the sons of Odin, who is greater than Jehovah!”

Who else stood for German thought? Haeckel, whose _Riddle of the Universe_ carried its vulgar “omniscience” of materialism in sixpenny editions all round the world. And the Catholic spokesmen of such a people cried out to Heaven against the country of Coppée and de Mun, of Bazin, Barrès, Bourget, Ferdinand Brunetière and all the noblest voices of our time. One trivial touch is worth adding to the picture. The Catholic Committee of Action in France has established a fact, which, indeed, was already known, namely, that great numbers of the obscene books which disgrace some bookstalls in Paris are normally printed in French in Budapest, Vienna and certain German cities.

Such was the contrast between the two peoples. The sins of France were in process of amendment. The corruptions of thought for which she was responsible had this mitigating quality: that they were such as destroy only those who practise them. And the true France, devoted to the establishment of a régime of world-peace, held out hospitable hands to every ideal of gracious import in science, religion and literature, wherever it arose. The essential sin of Prussia, on the contrary, was, that, worshipping only force, she planned the subjugation of all Europe. The goal of domination at which she aimed could be reached only through an ocean of blood. She willed war, she willed murder, and to prepare her way she sought to impose on the world a picture in which she appeared as a Knight of the Holy Ghost “in shining armour,” and all the other non-Germanic nations as robber-empires, degenerates, incompetents.

These words of introduction were necessary in view of the systematic libelling of France which goes on in certain obscure papers, and which proceeds, as all the world knows, chiefly from German organisations in the United States. But the purpose of this article is not controversial, but positive. It is concerned merely to give a random glimpse of the heroism with which at this moment in the trenches, the camps, and the hospitals the priests of France are serving the tricolour of the transfigured Republic.

A literature on the subject is already in existence. The book of the Abbé Klein, well known for his luminous study of the United States, has been translated into English: for that reason, and also because it is less rich in detail, I do not draw on it. The pictures of war which follow are derived mainly from a collection of soldiers’ letters, edited by Ernest Daudet, from _Les Soutanes sous la Mitraille_, by the Abbé René Gaell, _prêtre-infirmier_, and from _Le Clergé, Les Catholiques, et la Guerre_, by Gabriel Langlois, with a preface by Mgr. Herscher, Archbishop of Laodicea.