Chapter V: Part 5

This is the first time that I find myself absolutely, infinitely alone, in the midst of this scene of intense desolation, which, though to-day it happens to glitter with light, is none the less dismal. Until I reach the little wood whither I am bound on duty there is nothing to think about, nothing with which I need concern myself. I need not trouble to get out of the way of shells, for they would not give me time, nor even to select places where to put my feet, since I sink in equally wherever I step. And so, gradually, I find myself relapsing into a state of mind characteristic of former days before the war, and I look at all these things to which I had grown accustomed and view them impartially, as if they were new. Twenty short months ago, who would have imagined such scenes? For instance, these countless spoil-heaps, white in colour, because the soil of this province is white, spoil-heaps which are thrown up everywhere in long lines, tracing on the desert so many zebra-like stripes; is it possible that these indicate the only tracks by which to-day our soldiers of France can move about with some measure of safety? They are little hollow tracks, some undulating, some straight, communication trenches which the French nickname "intestines." These have been multiplied again and again, until the ground is furrowed with them unendingly. What prodigious work, moreover, they represent, these mole-like paths, spreading like a network over hundreds of leagues. If to their sum be added trenches, shelter caves, and all those catacombs that penetrate right into the heart of the hills, the mind is amazed at excavations so extensive, which would seem the work of centuries.

And these strange kinds of nets, stretched out in all directions, would anyone, unless previously warned and accustomed to them, understand what they were? They look as if gigantic spiders had woven their webs around countless numbers of posts, which stretch out beyond range of sight, some in straight lines, some in circles or crescents, tracing on that wide tract of country designs in which there must surely be some cabalistic significance intended to envelop and entangle the barbarians more effectively. Since I last came this way these obstructing nets must have been reinforced to a terrible extent, and their number has been multiplied by two, by ten. In order to achieve such inextricable confusion our soldiers, those weavers of snares, must have made in them turnings and twists with their great bobbins of barbed wire carried under their arms. But here, at various points, are enclosures, whose purpose is obvious at a glance and which add to the grisly horror of the whole scene; these fences of wood surround closely packed groups of humble little wooden crosses made of two sticks. Alas! what they are is clear at first sight. Thus, then, they lie, within sound of the cannonade, as if the battle were not yet over for them, these dear comrades of ours who have vanished, heroes humble yet sublime--inapproachable for the present, even for those who weep for them, inapproachable, because death never ceases to fly through the air which stirs overhead, above their little silent gatherings.

Ah! to complete the impression of unreality a black bird appears of fabulous size, a monster of the Apocalypse, flying with great clamour aloft in the air. He is moving in the direction of France, seeking, no doubt, some more sheltered region, where at last women and children are to be found, in the hope of destroying some of them. I keep on walking, if walking it can be called, this wearisome, pitiless repetition of plunges into snow and ice-cold mud. At last I reach the clump of trees where we have arranged to meet. I am thankful to have arrived there, for my helmet and cap were encumbrances under that unexpectedly hot sun. I am, however, before my time. The officer whom I invited to meet me here--in order to discuss questions concerning new works of defence, new networks of lines, new pits--that is he, no doubt, that blue silhouette coming this way across the snow-shrouded ground. But he is far away, and for a few more moments I can still indulge in the reverie with which I whiled away the journey, before the time comes when I must once more become precise and businesslike. Evidently the place is not one of perfect peace, for it is clear that these melancholy boughs, half stripped of leaves already, have suffered from those great humming cockchafers that fly across from time to time, and have been shot through as if they were no stronger than sheets of paper. It is, to be sure, but a small wood, yet it keeps me company, wrapping me round with an illusion of safety.

I am standing here on rising ground, where the wind blows more icily, and I command a view of the whole terrible landscape, a succession of monotonous hills, striped in zebra fashion with whitish trenches; its few trees have been blasted by shrapnel. In the distance that network of iron wire, stretching out in all directions, shines brightly in the sun, and is not unlike the gossamer which floats over the meadows in spring time. And on all sides the detonation of artillery continues with its customary clamour, unceasing here, day and night, like the sea beating against the cliffs.

Ah! the big black bird has found someone to talk to in the air. I see it suddenly assailed by a quantity of those flakes of white cotton wool (bursts of shrapnel), in appearance so innocent, yet so dangerous to birds of his feather. So he hurriedly turns back, and his crimes are postponed to another day.

From behind a neighbouring hill issues a squad of men in blue, who will reach me before the officer on the road yonder. It is one, just one, of a thousand of those little processions which, alas! may be met with every hour all along the front, forming, as it were, part of the scenery. In front march four soldiers carrying a stretcher, and others follow them to relieve them. They, too, are attracted by the delusive hope of protection afforded by the branches, and at the beginning of the wood they stop instinctively for a breathing space and to change shoulders. They have come from first line trenches a mile or two away and are carrying a seriously wounded man to a subterranean field hospital, not more than a quarter of an hour's walk away. They, likewise, had not anticipated the heat of that terrible March sun, which is beating down on their heads; they are wearing their helmets and winter caps, and these weigh upon them as heavily as the precious burden which they are so careful not to jolt. In addition to this they drag along on each leg a thick crust of snow and sticky mud, which makes their feet as heavy as elephants' feet, and the sweat pours in great drops down their faces, cheerful in spite of fatigue.

"Where is your man wounded?" I ask, in a low voice.

In a voice still lower comes the reply: "His stomach is ripped open, and the Major in the trench said that----" they finish the sentence merely by shaking their heads, but I have understood. Besides he has not stirred. His poor hand remains lying across his eyes and forehead, doubtless to protect them from the burning sun, and I ask them:

"Why have you not covered his face?"

"We put a handkerchief over it, sir, but he took it off. He said he preferred to remain like this, _so that he could still look at things between his fingers_."

Ah! the last two men have blood as well as sweat pouring over their faces and trickling in a little stream down their necks.

"It is nothing much, sir," they say, "we got that as soon as we started. We began by carrying him along the communication trenches, but that jolted him too much, so then we walked along outside in the open."

Poor fellows, admirable for their very carelessness. To save their wounded man from jolts they risked their own lives. Two or three of these death-bringing cockchafers, which go humming along here at all hours, came down and were crushed to pieces on the stones close to them, and wounded them with their shattered fragments. The Germans disdain to fire at a single wayfarer like myself, but a group of men, and a stretcher in particular, they cannot resist. One of these men, both of whom are dripping with blood, has perhaps actually received only a scratch, but the other has lost an ear; only a shred is left, hanging by a thread.

"You must go at once and have your wound dressed at the hospital, my friend," I say to him.

"Yes, sir. And we are just on our way there, to the hospital. It is very lucky."

This is the only idea of complaint that has entered his head.

"It is very lucky."

And he says this with such a quiet, pleasant smile, grateful to me for taking an interest in him.

I hesitated before going to look more closely at their seriously wounded man who never stirred, for I feared lest I should disturb his last dream. Nevertheless I approach him very gently, because they are just going to carry him away.

Alas! he is almost a child, a child from some village; so much is clear from his bronzed cheeks, which have scarcely yet begun to turn pale. The sun, even as he desired, shines full upon his comely face, the face of a boy of twenty, with a frank and energetic expression, and his hand still shades his eyes, which have a fixed look and seem to have done with sight. Some morphia had to be given him to spare him at least unnecessary suffering.

Lowly child of our peasantry, little ephemeral being, of what is he dreaming, if indeed he still dreams? Perhaps of a white-capped mother who wept tender tears whenever she recognised his childish writing on an envelope from the front. Or perhaps he is dreaming of a cottage garden, the delight of his earliest years, where, he reflects, this warm March sun will call to life new shoots all along some old wall. On his chest I see the handkerchief with which one of the men had attempted to cover his face; it is a fine handkerchief, embroidered with a marquis's coronet--the coronet of one of his stretcher bearers. He had desired _still to look at things_, in his terror, doubtless, of the black night. But soon he will suddenly cease to be aware of this same sun, which now must dazzle him. First of all he will enter the half-darkness of the field hospital, and immediately afterwards there will descend upon him that black inexorable night, in which no March sun will ever rise again.

"Go on at once, my friends," I say to them, "the wind blows too cold here for people drenched with sweat like you."

I watch them move away, their legs weighted with slabs of viscous mud. My admiration and my compassion go with them on their way through the snow, where they plod along so laboriously.

These men, to be sure, still have some privileges, for they can at least help one another, and careful hands are waiting to dress their wounds in an underground refuge, which is almost safe. But close to this, at Verdun, there are thousands of others, who have fallen in confused heaps, smothering one another. Underneath corpses lie dying men, whom it is impossible to rescue from those vast charnel-houses, so long ago and so scientifically prepared by the Kaiser for the greater glory of that ferocious young nonentity whom he has for a son.

XXIV

AT SOISSONS

_September, 1915._

Soissons is one of our great martyred towns of the north; it can be entered only by circuitous and secret paths, with such precautions as Redskins take in a forest, for the barbarians are hidden everywhere within the earth and on the hill close at hand, and with field-glasses at their wicked eyes they scan the roads, so that they may shower shrapnel on any rash enough to approach that way.

One delightful September evening I was guided towards this town by some officers accustomed to its dangerous surroundings. Taking a zigzag course over low-lying ground, through deserted gardens, where the last roses of the season bloomed and the trees were laden with fruit, we reached without accident the suburbs, and were soon actually in the streets of the town. Grass had already begun to sprout there from the ruins during the last year in which all signs of human life had vanished. From time to time we met some groups of soldiers, otherwise not a soul, and a deathlike silence held sway under that wonderful late-summer sky.

Before the invasion it was one of these towns, fallen a little into neglect, that exist in the depths of our provinces of France, with modest mansions displaying armorial bearings and standing in little squares planted with elms; and life there must have been very peaceful in the midst of somewhat old-fashioned ways and customs. It is in the destruction of these old hereditary homes, which were doubtless loved and venerated, that senseless barbarism daily wreaks its vengeance. Many of these buildings have collapsed, scattering on to the pavement their antiquated furniture, and in their present immobility remain, as it were, in postures of suffering. This evening there happens to be a lull. A few somewhat distant cannon shots still come and punctuate, if I may say so, the funereal monotony of the hours; but this intermittent music is so customary in these parts that though it is heard it attracts no notice. Instead of disturbing the silence, it seems actually to emphasise it and at the same time to deepen its tragedy.

Here and there, on walls that still remain undamaged, little placards are posted, printed on white paper, with the notice: "House still occupied." Underneath, written by hand, are the names of the pertinacious occupants, and somehow, I cannot say why, this strikes the observer as being a rather futile formality. Is it to keep away robbers or to warn off shells? And where else, in what scene of desolation similar to this, have I noticed before other little placards such as these? Ah, I remember! It was at Pekin, during its occupation by European troops, in that unhappy quarter which fell into the hands of Germany, where the Kaiser's soldiers gave rein to all their worst instincts, for they may be judged on that occasion, those brutes, by comparing their conduct with that of the soldiers of the other allied countries, who occupied the adjoining quarters of the town without harming anyone. No, the Germans, they alone practised torture, and the poor creatures delivered up to their doltish cruelty tried to preserve themselves by pasting on their doors ingenuous inscriptions such as these, "Here dwell Chinese under French protection," or "All who dwell here are Chinese Christians." But this availed them nothing. Besides, their Emperor--the same, always the same, who is sure to be lurking, his tentacles swollen with blood, at the bottom of every gaping wound in whatever country of the world, the same great organiser of slaughter on earth, lord of trickery, prince of shambles and of charnel-houses--he himself had said to his troops:

"Go and do as the Huns did. Let China remain for a century terrorised by your visitation."

And they all obeyed him to the letter.

But the treasures out of those houses in Pekin, pillaged by his orders, that lay strewn on the ancient paving-stones of the streets over there, were quantities of relics very strange to us, very unfamiliar--images sacred to Chinese worship, fragments of altars dedicated to ancestors, little _stelae_ of lacquer, on which were inscribed in columns long genealogies of Manchus whose origins were lost in night.

Here, on the other hand, in this town as it is this evening, the poor household gods that lie among the ruins are objects familiar to us, and the sight of them wrings our hearts even more. There is a child's cradle, a humble piano of antiquated design, which has fallen upside down from an upper story, and still conjures up the thought of old sonatas played of an evening in the family circle.

And I remember to have seen, lying in the filth of a gutter, a photograph reverently "enlarged" and framed, the portrait of a charming old grandmother, with her hair in curl-papers. She must have been long at rest in some burial vault, and doubtless the desecrated portrait was the last earthly likeness of her that still survived.

The noise of the cannon comes nearer as we move on through these streets in their death-agony, where, during a whole summer of desolation, grasses and wild flowers have had time to spring up.

In the midst of the town stands a cathedral, a little older than that of Rheims and very famous in the history of France. The Germans, to be sure, delighted in making it their target, always under the same pretext, with a stupid attempt at cleverness, that there was an observation post at the top of the towers. A priest in a cassock bordered with red, who has never fled from the shells, opens the door for us and accompanies us.

It is a very startling surprise to find on entering that the interior of the church is white throughout with the glaring whiteness of a perfectly new building. In spite of the breaches which the barbarians have made in the walls from top to bottom, it does not, at first sight, resemble a ruin, but rather a building in course of construction, a work which is still proceeding. It is, moreover, a miracle of strength and grace, a masterpiece of our Gothic Art in the matchless purity of its first bloom.

The priest explains to us the reason for this disconcerting whiteness. Before the coming of the barbarians, the long task was scarcely completed of exposing the under-surface of each stone in turn, so that the joints might be more carefully repaired with cement; thus the grey hue with which the church had been encrusted by the smoke of incense, burnt there for so many centuries, had resolved itself into dust. It was perhaps rather sacrilegious, this scraping away of the surface, but I believe it helps to a better appreciation of the architectural beauties. Indeed, under that unvarying shade of cinder-grey which we are accustomed to find in our old churches, the slender pillars, the delicate groining of the vaults, seem, as it were, made all in one, and it might be imagined that no skill had been necessary to cause them thus to soar upwards. Here, on the contrary, it is incomprehensible, disconcerting almost, to see how these myriads and myriads of little stones, so distinct each from the other in their renovated setting, remain thus suspended, forming a ceiling at such a height above our heads. Far better than in churches blurred with smoky grey is revealed the patient, miraculous labour of those artists of old, who, without the help of our iron-work or our modern contrivances, succeeded in bestowing stability upon things so fragile and ethereal.

Within the basilica, as without, prevails an anguished silence, punctuated slowly by the noise of cannon shots. And on the episcopal throne this device remains legible, which, in the midst of such ruin, has the force of an ironic anathema launched against the barbarians, _pax et justitia_.

Walking among the scattered _debris_, I pick my way as carefully as possible to avoid stepping on precious fragments of stained-glass windows; it is pleasanter not to hear underfoot the little tinkle of breaking glass. All the shades of light of the summer evening, seldom seen in such sanctuaries, stream in through gaping rents, or through beautiful thirteenth-century windows, now but hollow frameworks. And the double row of columns vanishes in perspective in the luminous white atmosphere like a forest of gigantic white reeds planted in line.

Emerging from the cathedral, in one of the deserted streets, we come upon a wall covered with printed placards, which the shells seem to have been at special pains to tear. These placards were placed side by side as close together as possible, the margins of each encroaching upon those of its neighbours, as if jealous of the space the others occupied and all with an appearance of wishing to cover up and to devour one another. In spite of the shrapnel which has riddled them so effectively, some passages are still legible, doubtless those that were considered essential, printed as they were in much larger letters so that they might better strike the eye.

"Treason! Scandalous bluff!" shouts one of the posters.

"Infamous slander! Base lie!" replies the other, in enormous, arresting letters.

What on earth can all this mean?

Ah yes, it is a manifestation of all the pettiness of our last little election contests which has remained placarded here, pilloried as it were, still legible in spite of the rains of two summers and the snows of one winter. It is surprising how these absurdities have survived, simply on scraps of paper pasted on the walls of houses. As a rule no wayfarer looks at such things as he passes them, for in our day they have become too contemptible for a smile or a shrug of the shoulders. But on this wall, where the shells have ironically treated them as they deserved, piercing them with a thousand holes, they suddenly assume, I know not why, an air irresistibly and indescribably comic; we owe them a moment of relaxation and hearty laughter--it is doubtless the only time in their miserable little existence that they have at least served some purpose.

To-day who indeed remembers the scurrilities of the past? They who wrote them and who perhaps even now are brothers-in-arms, fighting side by side, would be the first to laugh at them. I will not say that later on, when the barbarians have at last gone away, party spirit will not again, here and there, attempt to raise its head. But none the less in this great war it has received a blow from which it will never recover. Whatever the future may hold for us, nothing can alter the fact that once in France, from end to end of our battle front and during long months, there were these interlacing networks of little tunnels called trenches. And these trenches, which seemed at first sight nothing but horrible pits of sordid misery and suffering, will actually have been the grandest of our temples, where we all came together to be purified and to communicate, as it were, at the same holy table.

As for our trenches, they begin close at hand, too close alas! to the martyred town; there they are, in the midst of the mall, and we make our way thither through these desolate streets where there is no one to be seen.

Everyone knows that almost all our provincial towns have their mall, a shady avenue of trees often centuries old; this one was reputed to be among the finest in France. But it is indeed too risky to venture there, for death is ever prowling about and we can only cross it furtively by these tortuous tunnels, hastily excavated, which are called communication trenches.

First of all we are shown a comprehensive view of the mall through a loophole in a thick wall. Its melancholy is even more poignant than that of the streets, because this was once a favourite spot where formerly the good people of the town used to resort for relaxation and quiet gaiety. It stretches away out of sight between its two rows of elms. It is empty, to be sure, empty and silent. A funereal growth of grass carpets its long alleys with verdure, as if it were given up to the peace of a lasting abandonment, and in this exquisite evening hour the setting sun traces there row upon row of golden lines, reaching away into the distance among the lengthening shadows of the trees. It might be deemed empty indeed, the mall of this martyred town, where at this moment nothing stirs, nothing is heard. But here and there it is furrowed with upturned earth, resembling, on a large scale, those heaps that rats and moles throw up in the fields. Now we can guess the meaning of this, for we are well acquainted with the system of clandestine passages used in modern warfare. From these ominous little excavations we conclude at once that, contrary to expectations, this place of mournful silence is populated by a terrible race of men concealed beneath its green grass; that eager eyes survey it from all sides, that hidden cannon cover it, that it needs but an imperceptible signal to cause a furious manifestation of life to burst forth there out of the ground, with fire and blood and shouts and all the clamour of death.

And now by means of a narrow, carefully hidden descent we penetrate into those paths termed communication trenches, which will bring us close, quite close, to the barbarians, so close that we shall almost hear them breathe. A walk along those trenches is a somewhat unpleasant experience and seems interminable. The atmosphere is hot and heavy; you labour under the impression that people are pressing upon you too closely, and that your shoulders will rub against the earthen walls; and then at every ten or twelve paces there are little bends, intentionally abrupt, which force you to turn in your own ground; you are conscious of having walked ten times the distance and of having advanced scarcely at all. How great is the temptation to scale the parapet which borders the trench in order to reach the open air, or merely to put one's head above it to see at least in which direction the path tends. But to do so would be certain death. And indeed there is something torturing in this sense of imprisonment within this long labyrinth, and in the knowledge that in order to escape from it alive there is no help for it, but to retrace one's steps along that vague succession of little turnings, strangling and obstructing.

The heat and oppressiveness of the atmosphere in these tunnels is increased by the number of persons to be met there, men in horizon blue overcoats, flattening themselves against the wall, whom, nevertheless, the visitor brushes against as he passes. In some parts the trenches are crowded like the galleries of an ant-hill, and if it suddenly became necessary to take flight, what a scene would ensue of confusion and crushing. To be sure the faces of these men are so smiling and at the same time so resolute that the idea of their flight from any danger whatsoever does not even enter the mind.

As the hour for their evening meal approaches they begin to set up their little tables, here and there, in the safest corners, in shelters with vaulted roofs. Obviously it is necessary to have supper early in order to be able to see, for certainly no lamps will be lighted. At nightfall it will be as dark here as in hell, and unless there is an alarm, an attack with sudden and flashing lights, they will have to feel their way about until to-morrow morning.

Here comes a cheerful procession of men carrying soup. The soup has been rather long on the way through these winding paths, but it is still hot and has a pleasant fragrance, and the messmates sit down, or get as near to that attitude as they can. What a strangely assorted company, and yet on what good terms they seem to be! To-day I have no time to linger, but I remember lately sitting a long time and chatting at the end of a meal in a trench in the Argonne. Of that company, seated side by side, one was formerly a long-named conscientious objector, turned now into a heroic sergeant, whose eyes will actually grow misty with tears at the sight of one of our bullet-pierced flags borne along. Near him sat a former _apache_, whose cheeks, once pale from nights spent in squalid drinking-kens, were now bronzed by the open air, and he seemed at present a decent little fellow; and finally, the gayest of them all was a fine-looking soldier of about thirty, who no longer had time to shave his long beard, but nevertheless preserved carefully a tonsure on the top of his head. And the comrade, who every other day did his best to conserve this tell-tale manner of hairdressing, was formerly a root-and-branch anticlericalist, by profession a zinc-maker at Belleville.

We continue our way, still without seeing anything, following blindly. But we must be near the end of our journey, for we are told:

"Now you must walk without making a sound and speak softly," and a little farther on, "Now you must not speak at all."

And when one of us raises his head too high a sharp report rings out close to us, and a bullet whistles over our heads, misses its mark, and is lost in the brushwood, whence it strips the leaves. Afterwards silence falls again, more profound, stranger than ever.

The terminus is a vaulted redoubt, its walls composed partly of clay, partly of sheet-iron. This blindage has been pierced with two or three little holes, which can be very quickly opened or shut by rapidly working mechanism, and it is through these holes alone that it is possible for us to look out for a few seconds with some measure of safety, without receiving suddenly a bullet in the head by way of the eyes.

What, have we only come as far as this? After walking all this time we have not reached even the end of the mall. In front of us still extend, under the shade of the elms, straight and peaceful, its desolate grass-grown walks. The sun has blotted out the golden lines it was tracing a moment ago, and twilight will presently be over all, and there is still no sound, not even the cries of birds calling one another home to roost; it is like the immobility and silence of death.

Looking in a different direction through another opening in the sheet-iron, on the other bank (the right bank), scarcely twenty yards away from us, quite close to the edge of the little river, of which we hold the left bank, we notice perfectly new earth-works, masked by the kindly protection of branches, and there, as in the mall, silence prevails, but it is the same silence, too obviously studied, suspicious, full of dread. Then someone whispers in my ear:

"It is _They_ who are there."

It is _They_ who are there, as indeed we had surmised, for in many other places we had already observed similar dreadful regions, close to our own, steeped in a deceptive silence, characteristic of ultra-modern warfare. Yes, it is _They_ who are there, still there, well entrenched in the shelter of our own French soil, which does not even fall in upon them and smother them. Sons of that vile race which has the taint of lying in its blood, they have taught all the armies of the world the art of making even inanimate objects lie, even the outward semblance of things. Their trenches under their verdure disguise themselves as innocent furrows; the houses that shelter their staffs assume the aspect of deserted ruins. They are never to be seen, these hidden enemies; they advance and invade like white ants or gnawing worms, and then at the most unexpected moment of day or night, preceded by all varieties of diabolical preparations that they have devised, burning liquids, blinding gas, asphyxiating gas, they leap out from the ground like beasts in a menagerie whose cages have been unfastened. How humiliating! After prodigious efforts in mechanics and chemistry to revert to the custom of the age of cave-dwellers; after fighting for more than a year with lethal weapons perfected with infernal ingenuity for slaughter at long range to be found thus, almost on top of one another for months at a time, with straining nerves and every sense alert, and yet all hidden away under cover, not daring to budge an inch!

How horrible! I believe they were actually whispering in those trenches opposite. Like ourselves they speak in low voices; nevertheless the German intonation is unmistakable. They are talking to one another, those invisible beings. In the infinite silence that surrounds us, their muffled whispers come to us, as it were, from below, from the bowels of the earth. An abrupt command, doubtless uttered by one of their officers, calls them to order, and they are suddenly silent. But we have heard them, heard them close to us, and that murmur, proceeding, as it were, from burrowing animals, falls more mournfully upon the ear than any clamour of battle.

It is not that their voices were brutal; on the contrary, they sounded almost musical, so much so that had we not known who the talkers were we should not have felt that shudder of disgust pass through our flesh; we should have been inclined, rather, to say to them:

"Come, a truce to this game of death! Are we not men and brothers? Come out of your shelters and let us shake hands."

But it is only too well known that if their voices are human and their faces too, more or less, it is not so with their souls. They lack the vital moral senses, loyalty, honour, remorse, and that sentiment especially, which is perhaps noblest of all and yet most elementary, which even animals sometimes possess, the sentiment of pity.

I remember a phrase of Victor Hugo which formerly seemed to me exaggerated and obscure; he said:

"Night, which in a wild beast takes the place of a soul."

To-day, thanks to the revelation of the German soul, I understand the metaphor. What else can there be but impenetrable, rayless night in the soul of their baleful Emperor and in the soul of their heir apparent, his ferret face dwarfed by a black busby with the charming adornment of a death's head? All their lives they have had no other thought than to construct engines for slaughter, to invent explosives and poisons for slaughter, to train soldiers for slaughter. For the sake of their monstrous personal vanity they organised all the barbarism latent in the depths of the German race; they organised (I repeat the word because though it is not good French alas! it is essentially German), they "organised," then, its indigenous ferocity; organised its grotesque megalomania; organised its sheep-like submissiveness and imbecile credulity. And afterwards they did not die of horror at the sight of their own work! Can it be that they still dare to go on living, these creatures of darkness? In the sight of so many tears, so many torments, such vast ossuaries, that infamous pair continue peacefully sleeping, eating, receiving homage, and doubtless they will pose for sculptors and be immortalised in bronze or marble--all this when they ought to be subjected to a refinement of old Chinese tortures. Oh, all this that I say about them is not for the sake of uselessly stirring up the hatred of the world; no, but I believe it to be my duty to do all that in me lies to arrest that perilous forgetfulness which will once again shut its eyes to their crimes. So much do I fear our light-hearted French ways, our simple, confiding disposition. We are quite capable of allowing the tentacles of the great devil-fish gradually to worm their way again into our flesh. Who knows if our country will not soon be swarming again with a vermin of countless spies, crafty parasites, navvies working clandestinely at concrete platforms for German cannon under the very floors of our dwellings. Oh, let us never forget that this predatory race is incurably treacherous, thievish, murderous; that no treaty of peace will ever bind it, and that until it is crushed, until its head has been cut off--its terrible Gorgon head which is Prussian Imperialism--it will always begin again.

When in the streets of our towns we meet those young men who are disabled, mutilated, who walk along slowly in groups, supporting one another, or those young men who are blinded and are led by the hand, and all those women, bowed down, as it were, under their veils of crape, let us reflect:

"This is their work. And the man who spent so long a time preparing all this for us is their Kaiser--and he, if he be not crushed, will think of nothing but how he may begin all over again to-morrow."

And outside railway stations where men are entrained for the front, we may meet some young woman with a little child in her arms, restraining the tears that stand in her brave, sorrowful eyes, who has come to say good-bye to a soldier in field kit. At the sight of her let us say to ourselves:

"This man, whose return is so passionately longed for, the Kaiser's shrapnel doubtless awaits; to-morrow he may be hurled, nameless, among thousands of others, into those charnel-houses in which Germany delights, and which she will ask nothing better than to be allowed to begin filling again."

Especially when we see passing by in their new blue uniforms the "young class," our dearly loved sons, who march away so splendidly with pride and joy in their boyish eyes, with bunches of roses at the ends of their rifles, let us consider well our holy vengeance against the enemy who are lying in wait for them yonder--and against the great Accursed, whose soul is black as night.

From that roofed-over redoubt where we are at present, whose iron flaps we have to raise if we would look out, the mall is still visible with its green grass; the mall, lying there so peaceful in the dim light of evening. The barbarians are no more to be heard; they have stopped talking; they do not move or breathe; and only a sense of uneasy sadness, I had almost said of discouraged sadness, remains, at the thought that they are so near.

But in order to be restored to hope and cheerful confidence, it is sufficient to turn back along the communication trenches, where the men are just finishing their supper in the pleasant twilight. As soon as our soldiers are far enough away from those others to talk freely and laugh freely, there is suddenly a wave of healthy gaiety and of perfect and reassuring confidence.

Here is the true fountain-head of our irresistible strength; from this source we draw that marvellous energy which characterises our attacks and will secure the final victory. Very striking at first sight in the groups around these tables is the excellent understanding, a kind of affectionate familiarity, that unites officers and men. For a long time this spirit has existed in the Navy, where protracted exile from home and dangers shared in the close association of life on board ship necessarily draw men nearer together; but I do not think my comrades of the land forces will be angry with me if I say that this familiarity, so compatible with discipline, is a more recent development with them than with us. One of the benefits conferred upon them by trench warfare is the necessity of living thus nearer to their soldiers, and this gives them an opportunity of winning their affection. At present they know nearly all those comrades of theirs who are simple privates; they call them by name and talk to them like friends. And so, when the solemn moment comes for the attack, when, instead of driving them in front of them with whips, after the fashion of the savages over there, they lead them, after the manner of the French, it is hardly necessary for them to turn round to see if everyone is following them.

Moreover, they are very sure that, if they fall, their humble comrades will not fail to hasten to their side, and, at the risk of their own lives, defend them, or carry them tenderly away.

Now it is to this superhuman war, and especially to the common existence in the trenches, that we owe the ennobling influence of this concord, those sublime acts of mutual devotion, at which we are tempted to bend the knee. And in part is it not likewise owing to life in the trenches, to long and more intimate conversations between officers and men, that these gleams of beauty have penetrated into the minds of all, even of those whose intelligence seemed in the last degree unimpressionable and jaded. They know now, our soldiers, even the least of them, that France has never been so worthy of admiration, and that its glory casts a light upon them all. They know that a race is imperishable in which the hearts of all awaken thus to life, and that Neutral Countries, even those whose eyes seem blinded by the most impenetrable scales, will in the end see clearly and bestow upon us the glorious name of liberators.

Oh let us bless these trenches of ours, where all ranks of society intermingle, where friendships have been formed which yesterday would not have seemed possible, where men of the world will have learnt that the soul of a peasant, an artisan, a common workman may prove itself as great and good as that of a very fine gentleman, and of even deeper interest, being more impulsive, more transparent and with less veneer upon it.

In trenches, communication trenches, little dark labyrinths, little tunnels where men suffer and sacrifice themselves, there will be found established our best and purest school of socialism. But by this term socialism, a term too often profaned, I mean true socialism, be it understood, which is synonymous with tolerance and brotherhood, that socialism, in a word, which Christ came to teach us in that clear formula, which in its adorable simplicity sums up all formulae, "Love one another."

XXV

THE TWO GORGON HEADS

"My plan is first to take possession. At a later stage I can
always find learned men to prove that I was acting within my
just rights."

FREDERICK II.

(_called, for want of a better epithet, the Great_).

I

THEIR KAISER

_April, 1916._

There are certain faces of the accursed, which reveal in the end with the coming of old age the accumulated horror and darkness that has been seething in the depths of the soul. The features are by no means always ignoble, but on these faces something is imprinted which is a thousand times worse than ugliness, and none can bear to look upon them. Thus it is with their Kaiser. The sight of his sinister presentment alone, a mere glimpse of the smallest portrait of him reproduced in a newspaper, is sufficient to make the blood run cold. Oh that viperine eye of his, shaded by flaccid lids, that smile twisted awry by all his secret vices, his utter hypocrisy, morbid brutality, added to cold ferocity, and overweening arrogance which in itself is enough to provoke a horsewhip to lash him of its own accord. Once in an old temple in Japan I saw a gruesome work of art, which was considered a masterpiece of genre painting, and had been preserved for centuries, wrapped in a veil, in one of the coffers containing temple treasures.

It is well known how highly the Japanese esteem gruesome works of art, and what masters their artists are in the cult of the horrible. It was a mask of a human face, with features, if anything, rather regular and refined, but if you looked at it attentively its appalling expression, at the same time cruel and lifeless, haunted you for days and nights. From out the cadaverous flesh, livid and lined, gleamed its two eyes, partly closed, but one more so than the other, and they seemed to wink, as if to say:

"For a long time, while I lay waiting there in my box, I meditated some ghastly surprise for you, and at last you have come; you are in my power, and here it is."

Well, for those who have eyes to see, the face of their Kaiser is as shocking as that mask, hidden away in the old temple over there; it matters not in what kind of helmet, more or less savage in design, he may choose to trick himself out, whether it have a spike or a death's head. In all the years during which the terrible expression of this man has haunted me, I not only shared the presentiment common to everyone else that he was "meditating some surprise for us," but I had a foreboding that his plot would be laid with diabolical wickedness and would prove more terrible than all the crimes of old, uncivilised times. And I said to myself:

"It is of vital importance for the safeguard of humanity to kill that thing."

Indeed he should have been killed, the hyena slain, before his latent rabidness had completely developed, or at least he should have been chained up, muzzled, imprisoned behind close set and solid bars.

What could have possessed the anarchists, to whom such an opportunity presented itself of redeeming their character, of deserving the gratitude of the world, what could have possessed them? When there is question of killing a sovereign they attempt the life of the charming young King of Spain. From the Austrian court, which held a far more suitable victim, they select and stab the mysterious and lovely Empress, who never harmed a soul. And of the quartet of kings in the Balkans, their choice fell upon the King of Greece, when there was that monster Coburg close at hand, an opportunity truly unique.

Their Kaiser, their unspeakable, Protean Kaiser, whenever it seems that everything possible has been said about him, bewilders one by breaking out in some new direction which no one could ever have foreseen. After his almost doltish obstinacy in persistently posing his Germany as the victim who was attacked, in spite of most blinding evidence to the contrary, most formal written proofs, most crushing confessions which escaped the lips of his accomplices, did he not just recently feel a need to "swear before God" that his conscience was pure and that he had not wished for war? Before what God? Obviously before his own, "his old God," proper to himself, whom in private he must assuredly call, "my old Beelzebub." What excellent taste, moreover, to couple that epithet "old" with such a name!

This Kaiser of theirs seems to have received from his old Beelzebub not only a mission to spread abroad the uttermost mourning, to cause the most abundant outpouring of blood and tears, but also a mission to shoot down all forms of beauty, all religious memorials; a mission to profane everything, defile everything, and disfigure everything that he should fail to destroy. He has succeeded even in bringing dishonour on science, by degrading it to play the part of accomplice in his crimes. Moreover it is not merely that this war of his, this war which he forced upon us with such damnable deliberation, will have been a thousand times more destructive of human life than all the wars of the past collectively, but he must needs likewise attack with vindictive fury, he and his rabble of followers, all those treasures of art which should have remained an inviolable heritage of civilised Europe. And if ever he had succeeded in realising his dream of morbid vanity and becoming absolute tyrant of the world, not by means of explosives and scrap-iron alone would he have achieved the ruin of all art, but through the incurably bad taste of his Germany. It is sufficient to have visited Berlin, the capital city of pinchbeck, of the gilded decorations of the parvenu, to form an idea of what our towns would have become. And with a shudder one contemplates the rapid and final decadence of those wonderful Eastern towns, Stamboul, Damascus, Bagdad, upon the day when they should submit to his law.

This unspeakable Kaiser of theirs, how cunningly sometimes he adds to dishonour a touch of the grotesque. For instance, did he not lately offer as a pledge to that insignificant King of Greece his word of a Hohenzollern? The day after the violation of Belgium to dare to offer his word was admirable enough, but to add that his word was that of a Hohenzollern, what a happy conceit! Is it the result of dense unconsciousness or of the insolent irony with which he regards his timid brother-in-law, at whose little army, on the occasion of a visit to Athens, he scoffed so disdainfully? Who that has some slight tincture of history is ignorant of the fact that during the five hundred years of its notoriety the accursed line of the Hohenzollern has never produced anything but shameless liars, kites that prey on flesh. As early as 1762 did not the great Empress Maria Theresa write of them in these terms:

"All the world knows what value to attach to the King of Prussia and his word. There is no sovereign in Europe who has not suffered from his perfidy. And such a king as this would impose himself upon Germany as dictator and protector! Under a despotism which repudiates every principle, the Prussian monarchy will one day be the source of infinite calamity, not only to Germany, but likewise to the whole of Europe."

Unhappy King of Greece, who approached too near to the glare of the Gorgon, and lies to-day annihilated almost by its baleful influence! Should not his example be as much an object lesson--though without the heroism and the glory--for sovereigns of neutral nations who have still been spared, as the examples of the King of Belgium and the King of Serbia?

Their Kaiser, whose mere glance is ominous of death, baffles reason and common sense. The morbid degeneracy of his brain is undeniable, and yet in certain respects it is nevertheless a brain excellently ordered for planning evil, and it has made a special study of the art of slaughter. For the honour of humanity let us grant that he is mad, as a certain prince of Saxony has just publicly declared.

Agreed; he is mad. His case may actually be classified as teratological, and in any other country but Germany this war of his would have resulted for him in a strait-waistcoat and a cell. But alas for Europe! the accident of his birth has made him Kaiser of the one nation capable of tolerating him and of obeying him--a people cruel by nature and rendered ferocious by civilisation, as Goethe avers; a people of infinite stupidity, as Schopenhauer confesses in his last solemn testament.

In some respects this infinite stupidity he himself shares. Otherwise would he have failed so irremediably in his first outset in 1914 as to imagine up to the very last moment that England would not stir, even in face of Belgium's great sacrifice.[3] And is there not at least as much folly as ferocity in his massacres of civilians, his torpedoing of ships belonging to neutral countries, his outrages in America, his Zeppelins, his asphyxiating gas; all those odious crimes which he personally instigated, and which have had merely the result of concentrating upon himself and his German Empire universal hatred and disgust?

After forty years of feverish preparation, with such formidable resources at his disposal, shrinking from no measures however atrocious and vile, trammelled by no law of humanity, by no pang of conscience, to wallow thus in blood, and yet after all to achieve nothing but failure--there is no other explanation possible; some essential quality must be lacking in his murderous brain. And the nation must indeed be German in character still to suffer itself to be led onwards to its downfall by an unbalanced lunatic responsible for such blunders. They are led onwards to downfall and butchery. And is there never a limit to the sheepish submission of a people who at this very moment are suffering themselves to be slaughtered like mere cattle in attacks directed with imbecile fury by a microcephalous youth, equally devoid of intelligence and soul?

II

FERDINAND OF COBURG

But recently it would have seemed an impossible wager to undertake to find an even more abominable monster than their Kaiser and their Crown Prince. Nevertheless the wager has been made and won; this Coburg has been found.