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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days, by
+Hall Caine
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days
+       Scenes In The Great War - 1915
+
+Author: Hall Caine
+
+Release Date: May 23, 2008 [EBook #25573]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DRAMA OF 365 DAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE DRAMA OF THREE HUNDRED & SIXTY-FIVE DAYS
+
+SCENES IN THE GREAT WAR
+
+By Hall Caine
+
+J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY - 1915
+
+
+      DEDICATED
+
+      TO THE YOUNG MANHOOD
+
+      OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE
+
+
+
+
+
+THE DRAMA OF 365 DAYS
+
+
+
+
+THE INVISIBLE CONFLICT
+
+Mr. Maeterlinck has lately propounded the theory {*} that what we call
+the war is neither more nor less than the visible expression of a vast
+invisible conflict. The unseen forces of good and evil in the universe
+are using man as a means of contention. On the result of the struggle
+the destiny of humanity on this planet depends. Is the Angel to prevail?
+Or is the Beast to prolong his malignant existence? The issue hangs on
+Fate, which does not, however, deny the exercise of the will of man.
+Mystical and even fantastic as the theory may seem to be, there is no
+resisting its appeal. A glance back over the events of the past year
+leaves us again and again without clue to cause and effect. It is
+impossible to account for so many things that have happened. We cannot
+always say, "We did this because of that," or "Our enemies did that
+because of the other." Time after time we can find no reason why things
+happened as they have--so unaccountable and so contradictory have they
+seemed to be. The dark work wrought by Death during the past year has
+been done in the blackness of a night in which none can read. Hence
+some of us are forced to yield to Mr. Maeterlinck's theory, which is, I
+think, the theory of the ancients--the theory on which the Greeks
+built their plays--that invisible powers of good and evil, operating
+in regions that are above and beyond man's control, are working out his
+destiny in this monstrous drama of the war.
+
+     * The Daily Chronicle.
+
+And what a drama it has been already! We had witnessed only 365 days of
+it down to August 4, 1915, corresponding at the utmost to perhaps three
+of its tragic acts, but what scenes, what emotions! Mr. Lowell used
+to say that to read Carlyle's book on the French Revolution was to
+see history as by flashes of lightning. It is only as by flashes of
+lightning that we can yet hope to see the world-drama of 1914-15.
+Figures, groups, incidents, episodes, without the connecting links
+of plots, and just as they have been thrown off by Time, the
+master-producer--what a spectacle they make, what a medley of motives,
+what a confused jumble of sincerities and hypocrisies, heroisms and
+brutalities, villainies and virtues!
+
+As happens in every drama, a great deal of the tragic mischief had
+occurred before the curtain rose. Always before the passage of war over
+the world there comes the far-off murmur of its approaching wings. Each
+of us in this case had heard it, distinctly or indistinctly, according
+to the accidents of personal experience. I think I myself heard it for
+the first time dearly when in the closing year of King Edward's reign I
+came to know (it is unnecessary to say how) what our Sovereign's feeling
+had been about his last visit to Berlin. It can do no harm now to
+say that it had been a feeling of intense anxiety. The visit seemed
+necessary, even imperative, there-fore the King would not shirk his
+duty. But for his country, as well as for himself, he had feared for his
+reception in Germany, and on his arrival in Berlin, and during his drive
+from the railway station with the Kaiser, he had watched and listened
+to the demonstrations in the streets with an emotion which very nearly
+amounted to dread.
+
+The result had brought a certain relief. With the best of all possible
+intentions, the newspapers in both capitals had reported that King
+Edward's reception had been enthusiastic. It hadn't been that--at least,
+it hadn't seemed to be that to the persons chiefly concerned. But it had
+been just cordial enough not to be chilling, just warm enough to carry
+things off, to drown that far-off murmur of war which was like the
+approach of a mighty wind. Then, during the next days, there had been
+the usual banqueting, with the customary toasting to the amity of the
+two great nations, whose interests were so closely united by bonds of
+peace! And then the return drive to the railway station, the clatter of
+horsemen in shining armour, the adieux, the throbbing of the engine,
+the starting of the train, and then.... "Thank God, it's over!" If the
+invisible powers had really been struggling over the destiny of men, how
+the evil half of them must have shrieked with delight that day as the
+Kaiser rode back to Potsdam and our King returned to London!
+
+
+
+
+PEN-PORTRAIT OF THE KAISER
+
+Other whisperings there were of the storm that was so soon to burst on
+the world. In the ominous silence there were rumours of a certain change
+that was coming over the spirit of the Kaiser. For long years he had
+been credited with a sincere love of peace, and a ceaseless desire
+to restrain the forces about him that were making for war. Although
+constantly occupied with the making of a big army, and inspiring it with
+great ideals, he was thought to have as little desire for actual warfare
+as his ancestor, Frederick William, had shown, while gathering up his
+giant guardsmen and refusing to allow them to fight. Particularly it was
+believed in Berlin (not altogether graciously) that his affection for,
+and even fear of his grandmother, Queen Victoria, would compel him to
+exhaust all efforts to preserve peace in the event of trouble with Great
+Britain. But Victoria was dead, and King Edward might perhaps be smiled
+at--behind his back--and then a younger generation was knocking at the
+Kaiser's door in the person of his eldest son, who represented forces
+which he might not long be able to hold in check. How would he act now?
+
+Thousands of persons in this country had countless opportunities before
+the war of forming an estimate of the Kaiser's character. I had only
+one, and it was not of the best. For years the English traveller
+abroad felt as if he were always following in the track of a grandiose
+personality who was playing on the scene of the world as on a stage,
+fond as an actor of dressing up in fine uniforms, of making pictures,
+scenes, and impressions, and leaving his visible mark behind him--as in
+the case of the huge gap in the thick walls of Jerusalem, torn down (it
+was said with his consent) to let his equipage pass through.
+
+In Rome I saw a man who was a true son of his ancestors. Never had
+the laws of heredity better justified themselves. Frederick William,
+Frederick the Great, William the First--the Hohenzollerns were all
+there. The glittering eyes, the withered arm, the features that gave
+signs of frightful periodical pain, the immense energy, the gigantic
+egotism, the ravenous vanity, the fanaticism amounting to frenzy, the
+dominating power, the dictatorial temper, the indifference to suffering
+(whether his own or other people's), the overbearing suppression of
+opposing opinions, the determination to control everybody's interest,
+everybody's work--I thought all this was written in the Kaiser's
+masterful face. Then came stories. One of my friends in Rome was an
+American doctor who had been called to attend a lady of the Emperor's
+household. "Well, doctor, what's she suffering from?" said the Kaiser.
+The doctor told him. "Nothing of the kind--you're entirely wrong. She's
+suffering from so and so," said the Majesty of Germany, stamping up and
+down the room. At length the American doctor lost control. "Sir," he
+said, "in my country we have a saying that one bad practitioner is worth
+twenty good amateurs--you're the amateur." The doctor lived through
+it. Frederick William would have dragged him to the window and tried to
+fling him out of it. William II put his arm round the doctor's shoulder
+and said, "I didn't mean to hurt you, old fellow. Let us sit down and
+talk."
+
+A soldier came with another story. After a sham fight conducted by the
+Kaiser the generals of the German army had been summoned to say what
+they thought of the Royal manoeuvres. All had formed an unfavourable
+opinion, yet one after another, with some insincere compliment, had
+wriggled out of the difficulty of candid criticism. But at length came
+an officer, who said:
+
+"Sir, if it had been real warfare to-day there wouldn't be enough wood
+in Germany to make coffins for the men who would be dead."
+
+The general lived through it, too--at first in a certain disfavour, but
+afterwards in recovered honour.
+
+Such was the Kaiser, who a year ago had to meet the mighty wind of War.
+He was in Norway for his usual summer holiday in July 1914 when affairs
+were reaching their crisis. Rumour has it that he was not satisfied
+with the measure of the information that was reaching him, therefore
+he returned to Berlin, somewhat to the discomfiture of his ministers,
+intending, it is said, for various reasons (not necessarily
+humanitarian) to stop or at least postpone the war. If so, he arrived
+too late. He was told that matters had gone too far. They must go on
+now. "Very well, if they must, they must," he is reported to have said.
+And there is the familiar story that after he had signed his name on the
+first of August to the document that plunged Europe into the conflict
+that has since shaken it to its foundations, he flung down his pen and
+cried, "You'll live to regret this, gentlemen."
+
+
+
+
+PEN-PORTRAIT OF THE CROWN PRINCE
+
+And then the Crown Prince. In August of last year nine out of every ten
+of us would have said that not the father, but the son, of the Royal
+family of Germany had been the chief provocative cause of the war.
+Subsequent events have lessened the weight of that opinion. But the
+young man's known popularity among an active section of the officers of
+the army; their subterranean schemes to set him off against his father;
+a vague suspicion of the Kaiser's jealousy of his eldest son--all these
+facts and shadows of facts give colour to the impression that not least
+among the forces which led the Emperor on that fateful first of August
+to declare war against Russia was the presence and the importunity of
+the Crown Prince. What kind of man was it, then, whom the invisible
+powers of evil were employing to precipitate this insensate struggle?
+
+Hundreds of persons in England, France, Russia, and Italy must have met
+the Crown Prince of Germany at more or less close quarters, and
+formed their own estimates of his character. The barbed-wire fence of
+protective ceremony which usually surrounds Royal personages, concealing
+their little human foibles, was periodically broken down in the case
+of the Heir-Apparent to the German Throne by his incursion every winter
+into a small cosmopolitan community which repaired to the snows of the
+Engadine for health or pleasure. In that stark environment I myself, in
+common with many others, saw the descendant of the Fredericks every day,
+for several weeks of several years, at a distance that called for no
+intellectual field-glasses. And now I venture to say, for whatever it
+may be worth, that the result was an entirely unfavourable impression.
+
+I saw a young man without a particle of natural distinction, whether
+physical, moral, or mental. The figure, long rather than tall; the
+hatchet face, the selfish eyes, the meaningless mouth, the retreating
+forehead, the vanishing chin, the energy that expressed itself merely in
+restless movement, achieving little, and often aiming at nothing at all;
+the uncultivated intellect, the narrow views of life and the world; the
+morbid craving for change, for excitement of any sort; the indifference
+to other people's feelings, the shockingly bad manners, the assumption
+of a right to disregard and even to outrage the common conventions on
+which social intercourse depends--all this was, so far as my observation
+enabled me to judge, only too plainly apparent in the person of the
+Crown Prince. 21
+
+Outside the narrow group that gathered about him (a group hailing,
+ironically enough, from the land of a great Republic) I cannot remember
+to have heard in any winter one really warm word about him, one story of
+an act of kindness, or even generous condescension, such as it is easy
+for a royal personage to perform. On the contrary, I was constantly
+hearing tales of silly fooleries, of overbearing behaviour, of
+deliberate rudeness, such as irresistibly recalled, in spirit if not in
+form, the conduct of the common barrator in the guise of a king, who, if
+Macaulay's stories are to be credited, used to kick a lady in the open
+streets and tell her to go home and mind her brats.
+
+
+
+
+SOME SALUTARY LESSONS
+
+Only it was not Prussia we were living in, and it was not the year 1720,
+so the air tingled occasionally with other tales of little salutary
+lessons administered to our Royal upstart on his style of pursuing the
+pleasures considered suitable to a Prince. One day it was told of him
+that, having given a cup to be raced for on the Bob-run, he was wroth
+to find on the notice-board of entries the names of a team of highly
+respectable little Englishmen who are familiar on the racecourse; and,
+taking out his pencil-case, he scored them off, saying, "My cup is for
+gentlemen, not jockeys," whereupon a young English soldier standing by
+had said: "We're not jockeys here, sir, and we're not princes; we are
+only sportsmen."
+
+I cannot vouch for that story, but I can certainly say that, after a
+particularly flagrant and deliberate act of rudeness, imperilling the
+safety of several persons in the village street, the Crown Prince of
+Germany was told to his foolish face by an Englishman, who need not be
+named, that he was a fool, and a damned fool, and deserved to be kicked
+off the road.
+
+And this is the mindless, but mischievous, person, the ridiculous
+buccaneer, born out of his century, who was permitted to interfere
+in the destinies of Europe; to help to determine the fate of tens of
+millions of men on the battlefields, and the welfare of hundreds of
+millions of women and children in their homes. What wild revel the
+invisible powers of evil must have held in Berlin on that night of
+August 1, 1914, after the Kaiser had thrown down his pen!
+
+
+
+
+PEN-PORTRAIT OF THE ARCHDUKE FERDINAND
+
+Then the Archduke Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary, whose assassination was
+the ostensible cause of this devastating war--what kind of man was he?
+Quite a different person from the Crown Prince, and yet, so far as I
+could judge, just as little worthy of the appalling sacrifice of human
+life which his death has occasioned. Not long before his tragic end I
+spent a month under the same roof with him, and though the house was
+only an hotel, it was situated in a remote place, and though I was not
+in any sense of the Archduke's party, I walked and talked frequently
+with most of the members of it, and so, with the added help of daily
+observation, came to certain conclusions about the character of the
+principal personage.
+
+A middle-aged man, stiff-set, heavy-jawed, with a strong step, and a
+short manner; obviously proud, reserved, silent, slightly imperious,
+self-centred, self-opinionated, well-educated in the kind of knowledge
+all such men must possess, but narrow in intellect, retrograde in
+sympathy, a stickler for social conventions, an almost unyielding
+upholder of royal rights, prerogatives, customs, and usages (although
+by his own marriage he had violated one of the first of the laws of his
+class, and by his unfailing fidelity to his wife continued to resist
+it), superstitious rather than religious, an immense admirer of the
+Kaiser, and a decidedly hostile critic of our own country--such was
+the general impression made on one British observer by the Archduke
+Ferdinand.
+
+The man is dead; he took no part in the war, except unwittingly by the
+act of dying, and therefore one could wish to speak of him with respect
+and restraint. Otherwise it might be possible to justify this estimate
+of his character by the narration of little incidents, and one such,
+though trivial in itself, may perhaps bear description. The younger
+guests of the hotel in the mountains had got up a fancy dress ball,
+and among persons clad in all conceivable costumes, including those of
+monks, cardinals, and even popes, a lady of demure manners, who did
+not dance, had come downstairs in the habit of a nun. This aroused the
+superstitious indignation of the Archduke, who demanded that the lady
+should retire from the room instantly, or he would order his carriage
+and leave the hotel at once.
+
+Of course, the inevitable happened--the Archduke's will became law,
+and the lady went upstairs in tears, while I and two or three others
+(Catholics among us) thought and said, "Heaven help Europe when the time
+comes for its destinies to depend largely on the judgment of a man whose
+be-muddled intellect cannot distinguish between morality of the real
+world and of an entirely fantastic and fictitious one."
+
+
+
+
+ONE OF THE OLDEST, FEEBLEST, AND LEAST CAPABLE OF MEN
+
+That time, as we now know, never came, but a still more fatal time did
+come--the cruel, ironical, and sinister time of July 28, 1914, when one
+of the oldest, feeblest, and least capable of living men, the Emperor
+of Austria, under the pretence of avenging the death of the
+heir-presumptive to his throne, signed with his trembling hand, which
+could scarcely hold the pen, the first of his many proclamations of
+war, and so touched the button of the monstrous engine that set Europe
+aflame.
+
+The Archduke Ferdinand was foully done to death in discharging a
+patriotic duty, but to think that the penalty imposed on the world for
+the assassination of a man of his calibre and capacity for usefulness
+(or yet for the violation of the principles of public safety,
+thereby involved) has been the murdering of millions of men of many
+nationalities, the destruction of an entire kingdom, the burning of
+historic cities, the impoverishment of the rich and the starvation of
+the poor, the outraging of women and the slaughter of children, is also
+to think that for the past 365 days the destinies of humanity have
+been controlled by demons, who must be shrieking with laughter at the
+stupidities of mankind.
+
+Thank God, we are not required to think anything quite so foolish,
+although we can not escape from a conclusion almost equally degrading.
+Victor Hugo used to say that only kings desired war, and that with the
+celebration of the United States of Europe we should see the beginning
+of the golden age of Peace. But the events of the tremendous days from
+July 28 to August 4,1914, show us with humiliating distinctness that
+though Kaisers, Emperors, Crown Princes, and Archdukes may be the
+accidental instruments of invisible powers in plunging humanity into
+seas of blood, a war is no sooner declared by any of them, however
+feeble or fatuous, than all the nations concerned make it their own.
+That was what happened in Central Europe the moment Austria declared
+war on Serbia, and the history of man on this planet has no record of
+anything more pitiful than the spectacle of Germany--"sincere, calm,
+deep-thinking Germany," as Carlyle called her, whose triumph in 1870 was
+"the hopefullest fact" of his time--stifling her conscience in order to
+justify her participation in the conflict.
+
+
+
+
+"GOOD GOD, MAN, DO YOU MEAN TO SAY..."
+
+"We have tried in vain to localize the just vengeance of our Austrian
+neighbour for an abominable royal murder," said the Germans, knowing
+well that the royal murder was nothing but a shameless pretext for an
+opportunity to test their strength against the French, and give law to
+the rest of Europe.
+
+"Let us pass over your territory in order to attack our enemy in the
+West, and we promise to respect your independence and to recompense you
+for any loss you may possibly sustain," said Germany to Belgium, without
+a thought of the monstrous crime of treachery which she was asking
+Belgium to commit against France.
+
+"Stand aside in a benevolent neutrality, and we undertake not to take
+any of the possessions of France in Europe," said Germany to Great
+Britain, without allowing herself to be troubled by so much as a
+qualm about the iniquity of asking us to trade with her in the French
+colonies. And when we rejected Germany's infamous proposals, and called
+on her to say if she meant to respect the independence of Belgium, whose
+integrity we had mutually pledged ourselves to protect, her Chancellor
+stamped and fumed at our representative, and said, "Good God, man, do
+you mean to say that your country will go to war for a scrap of paper?"
+
+
+
+
+A GERMAN HIGH PRIEST OF PEACE
+
+Nor did the theologians, publicists, and authors of Germany show a more
+sensitive conscience than her statesmen. One of the theologians was
+Adolf Harnack, professor of Church History in Berlin and intimate
+acquaintance of the Kaiser. Not long before the war he published a
+book entitled "What is Christianity?" which began with the words, "John
+Stuart Mill used to say humanity could not be too often reminded that
+there was once a man named Socrates. That is true, but still more
+important it is to remind mankind that a man of the name of Jesus Christ
+once lived among them." On this text the Book proceeded to enforce the
+practical application of Christ's teaching to the modern world, and
+particularly to propound his doctrine of the wickedness and futility
+of violence, which led the author to the conclusion that it was "not
+necessary for justice to use force in order to remain justice."
+
+Somewhat later Professor Harnack came to this country to attend, if I
+remember rightly, a World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh, and the
+memory of him which abides in our northern capital is that of a high
+priest and prophet of the new golden age that was dawning on the
+world--the age of universal brotherhood and peace. But no sooner had
+war come within the zone of Germany than this man signed (if he did
+not write) a manifesto of German theologians which told "evangelical
+Christians abroad" that the German "sword was bright and keen," that
+Germany was taking up arms to establish the justice of her cause and
+that ever through the storm and horror of the coming conflict the German
+people, with a calm conscience, would kneel and pray: "Hallowed be Thy
+name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven."
+
+
+
+
+"WE SHALL NEVER MASSACRE BELGIAN WOMEN"
+
+One of the writers who performed the same kind of moral somersault was
+Gerhart Hauptmann, author of a Socialist drama called "The Weavers,"
+and, rumour says, protege (what frightful irony!) of the Crown Prince,
+Hauptmann knew well (none better) that a vast proportion of the human
+family live perpetually on the borderland of want, and that of all who
+suffer by war the poor suffer most. Yet he wrote (and a degenerate son
+of the great Norwegian liberator, Bjornsen, published) a letter, in
+which, after telling the poor of his people that "heaven alone knew"
+why their enemies were assailing them, he called on them (in effect) to
+avenge unnameable atrocities, which he alleged, without a particle of
+proof, had been committed on innocent Germans living abroad, and then
+said, in allusion to Mr. Maeterlinck, "I can assure him that, although
+'barbarous Germans,' we shall never be so cowardly as to massacre or
+martyr the Belgian women and children." This was written in August 1914,
+at the very hour, as the world now knows, when the German soldiers in
+Liege were shooting, bayoneting, and burning alive old men and little
+children, raping nuns in their convents and young girls in the open
+streets. But the invisible powers of evil have no mercy on their
+instruments after they have worked their will, and Time has turned them
+into objects of contempt.
+
+Nor were the German people themselves, any more than their
+master-spirits and spokesmen, spared the shame of their duplicity
+in those early days of August 1914. A large group of them, including
+commercial and professional men, drew up a long address to the neutral
+countries, in which they said that down to the eleventh hour they had
+"never dreamt of war," never thought of depriving other nations of light
+and air or of thrusting anybody from his place. And yet the ink of their
+protest was not yet dry when they gave themselves the lie by showing
+that down to the last detail of preparation they had everything ready
+for the forthcoming struggle.
+
+Englishmen who were in Berlin and Cologne on July 81, and August 1
+(before any of the nations had declared war on Germany), could see what
+was happening, though no telegrams or newspapers had yet made known the
+news. A tingling atmosphere of joyous expectation in the streets; the
+cafes and beer-gardens crowded with civilians in soldiers' uniforms;
+orchestras striking up patriotic anthems; excited groups singing
+"Deutschland ueber Alles," or rising to their feet and jingling glasses;
+then the lights put out, and a general rush made for the railway
+stations--everybody equipped, and knowing his duty and his destination.
+
+
+
+
+THE OLD GERMAN ADAM
+
+It was the old historic story of German duplicity, and the nations of
+Europe had no excuse for being surprised. When the Prussian Monarchy
+was first bestowed on the relatively humble family of the Hoehenzollerns,
+they found their territory for the most part sterile, the soil round
+Berlin and about Potsdam--the favourite residence of the Margraves--a
+sandy desert that could scarcely be made to yield a crop of rye or oats,
+so they set themselves to enlarge and enrich it by help of an army
+out of all proportion to the size and importance of their States. The
+results were inevitable. When war becomes the trade of a separate class
+it is natural that they should wish to pursue it at the first favourable
+opportunity of conquest. That opportunity came to Prussia when Charles
+VI died and the Archduchess Maria Theresa succeeded to her father by
+virtue of a law (the Pragmatic Sanction), to which all the Powers
+of Europe had subscribed. Frederick had subscribed to it. But,
+nevertheless, in the name of Prussia, without any proper excuse or even
+decent pretext, he took possession of Silesia, thereby robbing the ally
+whom he had bound himself to defend, and committing the same great crime
+of violating his pledged word, which Germany has now committed against
+Belgium.
+
+But there was one difference between the outrages of 1740 and 1914.
+The great barrator made no hypocritical pretence of desiring peace.
+"Ambition, interest, the desire of making people talk about me carried
+the day, and I decided for war," he said. It was reserved for
+Harnack and Hauptmann, not to speak of the Kaiser, to cant about the
+responsibilities of "Kul-tur" (that harlot of the German dictionary,
+debased by all ignoble uses), about the hastening of the kingdom of
+heaven, and about the German sword being sanctified by God. But the old
+German Adam remained, and when, two days before the declaration of war
+with France, the German soldiers were flying to the Belgian frontier
+there was no thought of the Archduke Ferdinand or of the doddering
+old man on the Austrian throne, whose paternal heart had been sorely
+wounded. Germany was out to rob France of her colonies--to rob her, and
+the Germans knew it.
+
+"A few centuries may have to run their course," said their own poet
+Goethe (who surely knew the German soul), "before it can be said of the
+German people, 'It is a long time since they were barbarians.'"
+
+Such, then, were some of the events in the great drama of the war
+which took place in Germany before the rising of the curtain. Not a
+theologian, a philosopher, an historian, or a poet to recall the past of
+his country, to warn it not to repeat the crime of a century and a half
+before, which had stained its name for ever before the tribunals of man
+and God; not a statesman to remind a generation that was too young to
+remember 1870 of the miseries and horrors of war, for (alas for the
+welfare of the world!) the one great German voice that could have done
+so with searching and scorching eloquence (the voice of Bebel) had only
+just been silenced by the grave. And so it came to pass that Germany, in
+the last days of July 1914, presented the pitiful spectacle of a great
+nation being lured on to its moral death-agony amid canting appeals to
+the Almighty, and wild outbursts of popular joy.
+
+
+
+
+A CONVERSATION WITH LORD ROBERTS
+
+Meantime what had been happening among ourselves? The far-off murmur of
+the approaching wind had been heard by all of us, but as none can hope
+to describe the effect on the whole Empire, perhaps each may be allowed
+to indicate the character of the warning as it came to his own ears. It
+was at Naples, not long after the event, that I heard how the late King
+had felt about his last visit to Berlin. I was then on my way home
+from Egypt, where I had spent some days at Mena, while Lord Roberts was
+staying there on his way back from the Soudan. He seemed restless and
+anxious. On two successive mornings I sat with him for a long hour in
+the shade of the terraces which overlook the Pyramids discussing the
+"German danger." After the great soldier had left for Cairo he wrote
+asking me to regard our conversations as confidential; and down to this
+moment I have always done so, but I see no harm now (quite the reverse
+of harm) in repeating the substance of what he said so many years ago on
+a matter of such infinite momentousness.
+
+"Do you really attach importance to this scare of a German invasion?" I
+asked.
+
+"I'm afraid I do," said Lord Roberts.
+
+"You think an enemy army could be landed on our shores?"
+
+"As things are now, yes, I think it could."
+
+"Do you think you could land an army on the East Coast of England and
+march on to London?"
+
+"Yes, I do."
+
+"In a thick fog, of course?" "Without a fog," said Lord Roberts. After
+that he described in detail the measures we ought to take to make such
+an attack impossible and I hasten to add that, so far as I can see and
+know, the precautionary measures he recommended have all been taken
+since the outbreak of the war.
+
+
+
+
+"WE'LL FIGHT AND FIGHT SOON"
+
+By that time I had, in common with the majority of my countrymen who
+travelled much abroad, been compelled to recognize the ever-increasing
+hostility of the German and British peoples whenever they encountered
+each other on the highways of the world--their constant cross-purposes
+on steamships, in railway trains, hotels, casinos, post and telegraph
+offices--making social intercourse difficult and friendship impossible.
+The overbearing manners of many German travellers, their aggressive and
+domineering selfishness, which always demanded the best seats, the best
+rooms, and the first attention, was year by year becoming more and more
+intolerable to the British spirit. It cannot be said that we acquiesced.
+Indeed, it must be admitted that our country-people usually met the
+German claims to be the supermen of Europe with rather unnecessary
+self-assertion. If an unmannerly German pushed before us at the counter
+of a booking-office we pushed him back; if he shouted over our shoulders
+at a telegraph office we told him to hold his tongue; and if, in
+stiflingly hot weather, he insisted (as he often did) on shutting up
+again and again the window of a railway carriage after we had opened it
+for a breath of air, we sometimes drove our elbow through the glass for
+final answer--as I saw an English barrister do one choking day on the
+journey between Jaffa and Jerusalem.
+
+These were only the straws that told how the wind blew, but they were
+disquieting symptoms nevertheless to such of us as felt, with Professor
+Harnack and his colleagues at the Edinburgh Conference, that by blood,
+history, and faith the German and British peoples were brothers (ugly
+as it sounds to say so now), each more closely bound to the other in the
+world-task of civilization than with almost any other nation.
+
+"If we are brothers we'll fight all the more fiercely for that fact," we
+thought, "and, God help us, we'll fight soon."
+
+
+
+
+"HE KNOWS, DOESN'T HE?"
+
+I was staying in a neutral country at an hotel much frequented by the
+German governing classes when an English newspaper proprietor, after
+a visit to Berlin, published in his most popular journal a map of a
+portion of Northern Europe in order to show at sight his view of the
+extent of the forthcoming German aggression. The paper was lying open
+between a group of gentlemen whose names have since become prominent
+in relation to the war when I stepped up to the table. The men were
+obviously angry, although laughing immoderately. "Look at that," said
+one of them, pointing to the map and running his finger down the coast
+of Holland and Belgium and France to Calais. "_He_ knows, doesn't he?"
+
+And then, after a general burst of derisive laughter, came a bitter
+attack on British journalism ("The scaremongering of that paper is
+doing more than anything in the world to make war between Germany and
+England"), a still fiercer and more bitter assault on our Lords of the
+Admiralty, who had lately proposed a year's truce in the building of
+battleships ("Tell your Mr. Churchill to mind his own business, and
+we'll mind ours"), and, finally, a passionate protest that Germany's
+object in increasing her navy was not to enlarge her empire, but
+merely to keep the seas open to her trade. "Why," said one of the men,
+"nine-tenths of my own business is with London, and if England could
+shut up our ships I should be a ruined man in a month." "Quite so," said
+another, "and so far as German people go that's the beginning and end of
+the whole matter."
+
+
+
+
+WE BELIEVED IT
+
+We believed it. I am compelled to count myself among the number of my
+countrymen who through many years believed that story--that the accident
+of Germany's disadvantageous geographical position, not her desire to
+break British supremacy on the sea, made it necessary for her to enlarge
+her navy. I did my best to believe it when I had to sail through the
+Kiel Canal in a steamer from Lubeck to Copenhagen, which was forced to
+shoulder her way through an ever-increasing swarm of German battleships.
+I did my best to believe it when I had to sail under the threatening
+fortresses of Heligoland which stood anchored out at the mouth of the
+Bight like a mastiff at the end of his chain snarling at the sea. I did
+my best to believe it when I had to travel to Cologne by night, and the
+darkened railway carriages were lit up by fierce flashes from gigantic
+furnaces which were making mountains of munitions for the evil day when
+frail man would have to face the murderous slaughter of machine-guns.
+I did my best to believe it even in Berlin when German friends of the
+scholastic classes accounted for their tolerance of conscription and
+of the tyranny of clanking soldiery in the streets, the cafes, and the
+hotels on the ground of disciplinary usefulness rather than military
+necessity.
+
+And then there was the human charm of some German homes to soothe
+away suspicion--the scholar's quiet house (beyond the clattering
+parade-ground at Potsdam) where we clinked glasses and drank "to all
+good friends in England," and the sweet simplicity of the little town in
+Westphalia, with its green fields and its sweetly-flowing river, where
+the nightingale sang all night long, and where, in the midst of musical
+societies, Goethe Societies and Shakespeare Societies, it was so
+difficult to think of Germany as a nation dreaming only of world-power
+and dominion. Even yet it strikes a chill to the heart to recall those
+German homes as scenes of prolonged duplicity, I prefer not to do
+so. But all the same I see now that the wings of war were already
+approaching them, and that the German people heard their far-off murmur
+long before ourselves--heard it and told us nothing, perhaps much less
+and worse than nothing.
+
+
+
+
+THE FALLING OF THE THUNDERBOLT
+
+Into such an unpromising atmosphere of national hostility the war came
+down on us, in July 1914, like a thunderbolt. In spite of grave warnings
+few or none in this country were at that moment giving a thought to it.
+On the contrary, we were thinking of all manner of immeasurably smaller
+things, for Great Britain, although governing more than one-fifth of the
+habitable globe, has an extraordinary capacity for becoming absorbed in
+the affairs of its two little islands. It was so in the autumn of 1914,
+when we thought Home Rule and Land Reform covered all our horizon,
+although a thunder-cloud that was to silence these big little guns had
+already gathered in the sky.
+
+Perhaps it was not altogether our fault if secret diplomacy had too
+long concealed from us the storm that was so soon to break. That kind
+of surprise must never come to us again. Many and obvious may be the
+dangers of allowing the public to participate in delicate and difficult
+negotiations between nations, but if democracy has any rights surely the
+chief of them is to know step by step by what means its representatives
+are controlling its destiny. We did not hear what was happening in the
+Cabinets of Europe, under that miserable disguise of the Archduke's
+assassination, until the closing days of July. Consequently, we reeled
+under the danger that threatened us, and were not at first capable of
+comprehending the cause and the measure of it.
+
+"What is this wretched conspiracy in Serbia to us, and why in God's name
+should we have to fight about it?" we thought. Or perhaps, "We've always
+been told that treaties between nations are safeguards of peace, but
+here, heaven help us, they are dragging us into war."
+
+So general was this sentiment of revolt during the last tragic days that
+it is commonly understood to have extended to the Cabinet. Six members
+are said to have opposed war. One of them, a philosopher and historian
+of high distinction, could not see his way with his colleagues, and
+retired from their company. Another, who came from the working-classes,
+is understood to have resigned from thought of the sufferings which
+any war, however justifiable, must inevitably inflict upon the poor. A
+third, a lawyer in a position of the utmost authority, is believed
+to have had grave misgivings about our legal right to call Germany to
+account. And I have heard that a fourth, who had been prominent as a
+pacifist in the days of an earlier conflict, had written a letter to a
+colleague as late as the evening of August 1, saying that a war declared
+merely on grounds of problematical self-interest would create such an
+outcry in Great Britain as had never been heard here before--leaving us
+a derided and, therefore, easily-vanquished people.
+
+
+
+
+THE PART CHANCE PLAYED
+
+But chance plays the largest part in the drama of life, and accident
+often confounds the plans of men. Not feeling entirely sure of his
+letter the pacifist Minister put it in his pocket when he dressed
+that night to go out to dinner. And when he sat down at table he found
+himself seated next to the able, earnest, and passionately patriotic
+Minister for Belgium. Perhaps he was urging some objections to British
+intervention, when his neighbour said: "But what about Belgium? You have
+promised to protect her, and if you don't do so she will be destroyed."
+
+That raised visions of the work of the little nations; memories of
+their immense contributions to human progress from the days of Israel
+downwards; thoughts of the vast loss to liberty, to morality, to
+religion, and to all the other fruits of the unfettered soul that
+would come to the world from the over-riding of the weak peoples by
+the strong. The result was swift and sure--the letter in the Minister's
+pocket never reached the important person to whom it was addressed.
+
+Only God knows whether this period, however short, of indecision among
+our people, and particularly among our responsible statesmen, with the
+consequent delay in dispatching a determined warning to Germany ("Hands
+off Belgium,") contributed to the making of the war. But it is at least
+an evidence of our desire for peace, and a sufficient assurance that
+if unseen powers were working on our side also, they were the powers of
+good. Yet so strangely do the invisible forces confound the plans of men
+that the crowning proof of this came two days later--on August 8, in
+the Commons--when our Foreign Minister defined the British position, and
+practically declared for war.
+
+It is not idle rumour that the Government went down to the House that
+day expecting to be resisted. The sequel was a startling surprise. Sir
+Edward Grey's speech was far from a great oration. It gave the effect of
+being unprepared as to form, so loosely did the vehicle hang together,
+the sentences sometimes coming with strange inexactitude for the tongue
+of one whose written word in dispatches has a clarity and precision that
+have never been excelled. But it had the supreme qualities of manifest
+sincerity and transparent honesty, and it derived its overwhelming
+effect from one transcendent characteristic of which the speaker himself
+may have been quite unconscious. It spoke to the British Empire as to a
+British gentleman. "You can't stand by and do nothing while the friend
+by your side is being beaten to his knees. You can't let a mischievous
+and unprincipled buccaneer tread into the dust the neighbour whom he has
+joined with you in swearing to protect?" There was no resisting that
+Our own interest might leave us cold; we might even be sceptical of our
+danger. But we were put on our honour, and every man in the House with
+the instincts of a gentleman was swept away by that appeal as by a
+flood.
+
+
+
+
+"WHY ISN'T THE HOUSE CHEERING?"
+
+Then came our Prime Minister's passionate, fiery, yet dignified and even
+exalted denunciation of the proposal of Germany that we should trade
+with her in our neutrality by committing treachery to France and
+Belgium--("To accept your infamous offer would be to cover the glorious
+name of England with undying shame"); then the announcement of the
+ultimatum sent by Great Britain to Germany demanding an assurance that
+the neutrality of Belgium should be respected; and finally that speech
+of John Redmond's, which, spoken on the very top of the crisis that had
+threatened to bring a fratricidal war into Ireland, has been, perhaps,
+the most thrilling and dramatic utterance yet produced by the war. "I
+tell the Government they may take every British soldier out of Ireland
+to meet the enemy of the Empire. Ireland's sons will take care of
+Ireland. The Catholics of the South will stand shoulder to shoulder
+with their Protestant fellow-countrymen of the North to fight the common
+foe."
+
+It was another appeal to the gentlemen in the British nation, and in
+one moment it swept the bitter waters of the Home Rule crisis out of
+all sight and memory. I have heard a Cabinet Minister say that, as he
+listened to Redmond's speech, he was surprised at the silence with which
+it was received. "Why isn't the House cheering?" he had asked himself.
+But all at once he had felt his eyes swimming and his throat tightening,
+and then he had understood.
+
+
+
+
+THE NIGHT OF OUR ULTIMATUM
+
+Our nation knew everything now, and had made her choice, yet the twelve
+hours' interval between noon and midnight of August 4 were perhaps the
+gravest moments in her modern history. I am tempted, not without some
+misgivings, but with the confidence of a good intention, to trespass so
+far on personal information as to lift the curtain on a private scene in
+the tremendous tragic drama.
+
+The place is a room in the Prime Minister's house in Downing Street. The
+Prime Minister himself and three of the principal members of his Cabinet
+are waiting there for the reply to the ultimatum which they sent to
+Germany at noon. The time for the reply expires at midnight. It is
+approaching eleven o'clock. In spite of her "infamous proposal," the
+Ministers cannot even yet allow themselves to believe that Germany will
+break her pledged word.
+
+She would be so palpably in the wrong. It is late and she has not yet
+replied, but she will do so--she must. There is more than an hour left,
+and even at the last moment the telephone bell may ring and then the
+reply of Germany, as handed to the British Ambassador in Berlin, will
+have reached London.
+
+It is a calm autumn evening, and the windows are open to St. James's
+Park, which lies dark and silent as far as to Buckingham Palace in the
+distance. The streets of London round about the official residence are
+busy enough and quivering with excitement. We British people do not go
+in solid masses surging and singing down our Corso, or light candles
+along the line of our boulevards. But nevertheless all hearts are
+beating high--in our theatres, our railway stations, our railway trains,
+our shops, and our houses. Everybody is thinking, "By twelve o'clock
+to-night Germany has got to say whether or not she is a perjurer and a
+thief."
+
+Meanwhile, in the silent room overlooking the park time passes slowly.
+In spite of the righteousness of our cause, it is an awful thing to
+plunge a great empire into war. The miseries and horrors of warfare
+rise before the eyes of the Ministers, and the sense of personal
+responsibility becomes almost insupportable. Could anything be more
+awful than to have to ask oneself some day in the future, awakening in
+the middle of the night perhaps, after rivers of blood have been shed,
+"Did I do right after all?" The reply to the ultimatum has not even yet
+arrived, and the absence of a reply is equivalent to a declaration of
+war.
+
+
+
+
+THE THUNDERSTROKE OF FATE
+
+Suddenly one of the little company remembers something which everybody
+has hitherto forgotten--the difference of an hour between the time in
+London and the time in Berlin. Midnight by mid-European time would be
+eleven o'clock in London. Germany would naturally understand the demand
+for a reply by midnight to mean midnight in the country of dispatch.
+Therefore at eleven o'clock by London time the period for the reply will
+expire. It is now approaching eleven.
+
+As the clock ticks out the remaining minutes the tension becomes
+terrible. Talk slackens. There are long pauses. The whole burden of the
+frightful issues involved for Great Britain, France, Belgium, Russia,
+Germany--for Europe, for the world, for civilization, for religion
+itself, seems to be gathered up in these last few moments. If war comes
+now it will be the most frightful tragedy the world has ever witnessed.
+Twenty millions of dead perhaps, and civil life crippled for a hundred
+years. Which is it to be, peace or war? Terrible to think that as they
+sit there the electric wires may be flashing the awful tidings, like a
+flying angel of life or death, through the dark air all over Europe.
+
+The four men are waiting for the bell of the telephone to ring. It does
+not ring, and the fingers of the clock are moving. The world seems to
+be on tiptoe, listening for a thunderstroke of Fate. The Ministers at
+length sit silent, rigid, almost petrified, looking fixedly at floor
+or ceiling. Then through the awful stillness of the room and the park
+outside comes the deep boom of "Big Ben." Boom, boom, boom! No one moves
+until the last of the eleven strokes has gone reverberating through the
+night. Then comes a voice, heavy with emotion, yet firm with resolve,
+"It's war."
+
+When the clock struck again (at midnight) Great Britain had been at war
+for an hour without knowing it.
+
+If I have done wrong in lifting the curtain on this private scene, I
+ask forgiveness for the sake of the purpose I put it to--that of showing
+that it was not in haste, not in anger, but with an awful sense of
+responsibility to Great Britain and to humanity that our responsible
+Ministers drew the sword of our country.
+
+
+
+
+THE MORNING AFTER
+
+If Mr. Maeterlinck's theory is sound, that this war is the visible
+reflection of a vast, invisible conflict, what a gigantic battle of
+the unseen forces of good and evil must have been raging throughout the
+universe when Europe rose on the morning of August 5, 1914! Think what
+had happened. While the light was dawning, the sun was rising, and the
+birds were singing over Europe, the greater nations were preparing to
+turn a thousand square miles of it into a gigantic slaughter-house.
+After forty years of unbroken peace, in which civilization, as
+represented by law, science, surgery, medicine, art, music, literature,
+and above all religion, in their ancient and central home, had been
+striving to lift up man to the place he is entitled to in the scheme of
+creation, war had suddenly stepped in to drag him back to the condition
+of the barbarian. From this day onward he was to live in holes in the
+ground, to be necessarily unclean, inevitably verminous, and liable
+to loathsome diseases. Although hitherto law-abiding, and perhaps even
+pious, with an ever-developing sense of the value and sanctity of human
+life, he was henceforward to take joy in the destruction of thousands
+of his fellow-creatures by devilish machines of death, and not to shrink
+from an opportunity of thrusting his bayonet down the throat of his
+enemy. He was to set fire to churches, to throw images of Christ into
+the road, and, showing no mercy to old men and women and children,
+to destroy all and spare none. And why? Ostensibly because one quite
+commonplace Austrian gentleman had been foully murdered, but really
+because a vain and ambitious and rapidly increasing nation, living on
+an arid and insufficient soil, had come to consider themselves the
+master-spirits of humanity, and therefore entitled to possess the earth,
+or at least give law to all other nations.
+
+"We are doing wrong, but it is necessary to do wrong, and we shall make
+amends as soon as our military necessities have been served."
+
+
+
+
+"YOUR KING AND COUNTRY NEED YOU"
+
+What a mockery! What a waste! What a hideous reversion! What a
+confession of blank failure on the part of civilization, including
+morality and religion! But, happily, the invisible powers of evil had
+not got it all their own way, even on that morning of August 5. Out of
+the very shadow of battle great things were already being born among the
+children of men, and chief among them were the spirits of sacrifice and
+brotherhood. Even the cruel loss of nearly all that makes human
+life worth living--cleanliness and purity and exemption from foul
+disease--could be borne for the defence of truth and freedom. And then
+it was worth a world of suffering to realize the first-fruits of that
+golden age of brotherhood among all the nations of the earth (except
+those of our enemy) which has been the peace-dream of humanity for
+countless centuries.
+
+We in Great Britain have no reason to be ashamed of how our country
+answered the call. A few years before the outbreak of war I talked
+about conscription with a British admiral in the cabin of his flagship.
+"There's not the slightest necessity for it in this country," said the
+admiral. The moment war was declared the whole nation would rise to it.
+A great thrill would pass over our people from end to end of the land,
+and we should have millions flocking to the colours.
+
+The old sailor proved to be a true prophet. None of us can ever forget
+the spontaneous response in August 1914 to the cry, "Your King and
+country need you." To such as, like myself, are on the shadowed side of
+the hill of life, and therefore too old for service, it was a profoundly
+moving thing to see how swiftly our immense voluntary army sprang (as by
+a miracle) out of the earth, to look at the long lines of young soldiers
+passing with their regular step through the streets of London, to think
+of the situations given up, of the young wives and little children
+living at home on shortened means, and of the risk taken of life being
+lost just when it is most precious and most sweet.
+
+What was the motive power that impelled the young manhood of Great
+Britain to this tremendous sacrifice? The thought of our country's
+danger? The danger to France? The danger to Belgium? The fact that a man
+named Palmerston had pledged his solemn word for them long years before
+they were born, or even the mothers who bore them were born, that they
+would go to their deaths rather than allow a great crime to be committed
+or England's oath be broken? I don't know. I do not believe anybody
+knows. But I am not ashamed of my tears when I remember it all, and sure
+I am that in those first critical days of the war the invisible powers
+of justice must have been fighting on our side.
+
+
+
+
+THE PART PLAYED BY THE BRITISH NAVY
+
+Perhaps the first of the flashes as of lightning by which we have seen
+the drama of the past 365 days is that which shows us the part played by
+the British Navy. What a part it has been! Do we even yet recognize
+its importance? Have our faithful and loyal Allies a full sense of its
+tremendous effect on the fortunes of the campaign? On Sunday, August 2,
+two days before the dispatch of Great Britain's ultimatum to Germany,
+we saw thousands of our naval reserve flying off by special boats and
+trains to their ships on our east and south coasts. On Monday, August 8,
+the British Navy had taken possession of the North Sea.
+
+It was a legitimate act of peace, yet never in this world was there a
+more complete, if bloodless, victory. The great German North Sea fleet,
+which (according to a calculation) had been constructed at a cost of
+L300,000,000 sterling, to keep open the seas of the world to German
+trade; the fleet which had, in our British view, been built with the
+sole purpose of menacing British shores, was shut up in one day within
+the narrow limits of its own waters!
+
+In the light of what has happened since it is not too much to say that
+if the British Fleet had taken up its cue only forty-eight hours later
+the north coast of France would have been bombarded, every town on our
+east coast from Aberdeen to Dover would have been destroyed, and Lord
+Roberts's prophecy of German invasion would have been fulfilled. But,
+thank God, the watchdogs of the British Navy were there to prevent that
+swift surprise. They are there (or elsewhere) still, silently riding the
+grey waters in all seasons and all weathers, waiting and watching and
+biding their time, and meanwhile (in spite of the occasional marauding
+of submarines, the offal of fighting craft) keeping the oceans free to
+all ships except those of our enemies. And now, when we hear it said, as
+we sometimes do, that Great Britain holds only thirty-five miles of land
+on the battle-front in Flanders, let us lift our heads and answer, "Yes,
+but she holds thirty-five thousand miles of sea."
+
+
+
+
+THE PART PLAYED BY BELGIUM
+
+One of the earliest, and perhaps one of the most inspiring, of the
+flashes as of lightning whereby we saw the drama of the war was that
+which revealed the part played by Belgium. Has history any record of
+greater heroism and greater suffering? Such courage for the right! Such
+strength of soul against overwhelming odds and the criminal suddenness
+of surprise! Although the world has been told by Germany's spokesmen,
+including Herr Ballin, Prince von Buelow, and even Professor Harnack
+(all "honourable men," and the last of them a churchman), that down to a
+few days before the outbreak of hostilities "not one human being" among
+them had "dreamt of war," it is the fact that within a few hours of the
+dispatch of Germany's ultimatum, to Belgium, before the ink of it could
+yet be dry and while the period of England's ultimatum in defence of
+Belgian integrity was still unexpired, the German legions were attacking
+Liege.
+
+It was a cowardly and contemptible assault, but what a resistance it
+met with! A little peace-loving, industrial nation, infinitely small and
+almost utterly untrained, compared with the giant in arms assailing
+it, having no injury to avenge, no commerce to capture, no territory
+to annex, desiring only to be left alone in the exercise of its
+independence, stood up for six days against the invading horde, and
+hurled it back.
+
+But war is a crude and clumsy instrument for the defence of the right,
+and after a flash of Belgium's unexampled bravery we were compelled
+to witness many flashes of her terrible sufferings. Liege fell before
+overwhelming numbers, then Namur, Ter-monde, Brussels, Louvain, and,
+last of all, Antwerp. What a spectacle of horror! The harvests of
+Belgium trodden into the earth, her beautiful cities and ancient
+villages given up to the flames, her historic monuments, that had
+been associated with the learning and piety of centuries, razed to the
+ground; and, above everything in its pathos and pain, the multitudes
+of her people, old men, old women, young girls, and little children
+in wooden shoes, after the unnameable atrocities of a brutalized,
+infuriated, and licentious soldiery, flying before their faces as before
+a plague!
+
+
+
+
+WHAT KING ALBERT DID FOR KINGSHIP
+
+But there were flashes of almost divine light in the black darkness
+of Belgium's tragedy, and perhaps the brightest of them surrounded the
+person of her King. What King Albert did in those dark days of August
+1914, to keep the soul of his nation alive in the midst of the immense
+sorrow of her utter overthrow his nation alone can fully know. But we
+who are not Belgians were thrilled again and again by the inspired tones
+of a great Spirit speaking to his subjects with that authority, dignity,
+and courage which alone among free nations are sufficient to unite the
+people to the Throne.
+
+"A country which defends its liberties in the face of tyranny commands
+the respect of all. Such a country does not perish." What King Albert
+did for Belgium in the stand he made against German aggression is partly
+known already, and will leave its record in history, but what he did
+at the same time for kingship throughout the world, as well as in his
+country, can only be realized by the few who are aware that almost
+at the moment of the outbreak of war the Belgian Courts (much to the
+unmerited humiliation of Belgium) were on the eve of such disclosures
+in relation to the life and death of the King's predecessor as would
+certainly have shaken the credit of monarchy for centuries.
+
+Nobody who ever met the late King Leopold could have had any doubt that
+he was a great man, if greatness can be separated from goodness and
+measured solely by energy of intellect and character. I see him now as
+I saw him in a garden of a house on the Riviera, the huge, unwieldy
+creature, with the eyes of an eagle, the voice of a bull and the flat
+tread of an elephant, and I recall the thought with which I came away:
+"Thank God that man is only the King of a little country! If he had been
+the sovereign of a great State he would have become the scourge of the
+world."
+
+After King Leopold's death, accident brought me knowledge of astounding
+facts of his last days which were shortly to be exposed in Court--of
+the measure of his unnatural hatred of his children; of his schemes
+to deprive them of their rightful inheritance; of his relations with
+certain of his favourites and his death-bed marriage to one of them;
+of the circumstances attending the surgical operation which immediately
+preceded the extinction of his life; of the burning of endless documents
+of doubtful credit during the night before the knife was used; of the
+intrigues of women of questionable character over the dying man's body
+to share the ill-got gold he had earned in the Congo, and finally of his
+end, not in his palace, but in a little hidden chalet, alone save for
+one scheming woman and one calculating priest. What a story it was,
+whether true or false, or (as is most probable) partly true and partly
+false, of shame, greed, lust, and life-long duplicity! And all this dark
+tale was (one way or other) to be told in the cold light of open
+Court, to the general discredit of monarchy, by showing the world how
+contemptible may be some of the creatures who control the destinies of
+mankind.
+
+But the war and King Albert's part in it saved Belgium from that
+unmerited obloquy. The modest, retiring, studious, almost shy but heroic
+young sovereign who, with his valiant little band, is fighting by the
+side of our own king's soldiers, and the soldiers of the Republic of
+France, has sustained the highest traditions of kingship. He may have
+lost his country at the hands of a great Power, drunk with pride, but he
+has won Immortality. He may have no more land left to him than his tent
+is pitched upon, but his spiritual empire is as wide as the world. He
+may be a king without a kingdom, but he still reigns over a kingdom of
+souls.
+
+
+
+
+"WHY SHOULDN'T THEY, SINCE THEY WERE ENGLISHMEN?"
+
+The next flash as of lightning that revealed to us the progress of the
+drama of the past 365 days came at the end of the first month of the war
+with the terrible story of Mons. That touched us yet more closely than
+the tragedy of Belgium, for it seemed at first to be our own tragedy.
+Between the departure of an army and the first news of victory or defeat
+there is always a time of exhausting suspense. At what moment our first
+Expeditionary Force had left England no one quite knew, but after we
+learned that it had landed in France we waited with anxious hearts and
+listened with strained ears.
+
+We heard the tramp of the gigantic German army, pouring through the
+streets of Brussels, fully equipped down to its kitchens, its
+smoking coffee-wagons, its corps of gravediggers, and, of course, its
+cuirassiers in burnished helmets that were shining in the autumn sun.
+The huge, interminable, apparently irresistible multitude! Regiment
+after regiment, battalion after battalion, going on and on for hours,
+and even days--the mighty legions of the nation that a few days before
+had "never so much as dreamt" of war!
+
+At last we had news of our men. Against overwhelming odds they had
+fought like heroes--why shouldn't they, since they were Englishmen?--but
+had been compelled to fall back at length, and were now retreating
+rapidly, some reports said flying in confusion, broken and done. What?
+Was it possible? Our army thrown back in disorder? Our first army, too,
+the flower of the fighting men of the world? It was too monstrous, too
+awful!
+
+The news was cruelly, and even wickedly, exaggerated, but nevertheless
+it did us good. He knows the British character very imperfectly who does
+not see that the qualities in which it is unsurpassed among the races
+of mankind are those with which it meets adversity and confronts the
+darkest night. Within a few days of the report that our soldiers were
+falling back from Mons, the old cry "Your King and country need you"
+went through the land with a new thrill, and hundreds of thousands of
+free men leapt to the relief of the flag.
+
+There has been nothing like it in the history of any nation. And it is
+hard to say which is the more moving manifestation of that moment in the
+great drama of the war--the spontaneous response of the poor who sprang
+forward to defend their country, though they had no more material
+property in it than the right to as much of its soil as would make their
+graves, or the splendid reply of the rich whose lands were an agelong
+possession, and often the foundation of their titles and honours.
+
+
+
+
+"BUT LIBERTY MUST GO ON, AND... ENGLAND."
+
+What startling surprises! We of the lower, the middle, or the
+upper-middle classes had come to believe that too many of the young men
+of our nobility had grown effeminate in idleness and selfish pleasure
+indulged in on the borderland of a kind of aristocratic Bohemia, but,
+behold! they were fighting and dying with the bravest. We had thought
+too many of their young women (as thoughtless and capricious creatures
+of fashion) had sacrificed the finest bloom of modest and courageous
+womanhood in luxury and self-indulgence; but, lo! they were hurrying
+to the battlefields as nurses, and there facing without flinching the
+scenes of blood and horror, of foul sights and stenches, which make the
+bravest man's heart turn sick.
+
+Some of the scenes at home in those last days of August and early days
+of September were yet more affecting. The first of our casualty lists
+had been published, and they were terrible. They hit the old people
+hardest, the old fathers and old mothers who had given all, and had
+nothing left--not even a little child to live for. At the railway
+stations, when fresh troops were leaving for the front, you saw sights
+which searched the heart so much that you felt ashamed to look, feeling
+they opened sanctuaries in which God's eye alone should see.
+
+Old Lady So-and-So seeing her youngest son off to Flanders. She has lost
+two of her sons in the war already, and Archie is the last of them. The
+dear old darling! It is pitiful to see her in her deep black, struggling
+to keep up before the boy. But when the train has left the platform and
+she can no longer wave her handkerchief she breaks down utterly. "I've
+seen the last of him," she says; "something tells me I've seen the last
+of him. And now I've given everything I have to the country."
+
+Ah! that's what you have all got to do, or be prepared to do, you brave
+mothers of England, if you have to defeat a desperate enemy, who stoops
+to any method, any crime.
+
+Then old Lord Such-a-One at Victoria to meet the body of his only son
+being brought back from the hospital at Boulogne. How proud he had been
+of his boy! He could remember the day he captained for Eton at Lord's,
+or perhaps rowed stroke--and won--for Cambridge. And now on the field
+of Flanders.... He had seen it coming, though. He had thought of it when
+the war broke out. "Ours is an old family," he had told himself, "four
+hundred years old, and my son is the last of us. If I let him go to the
+war my line may end, my family may stop... but then liberty must go on,
+civilization must go on, and... England!"
+
+Yes, it must be night before the British star will shine.
+
+
+
+
+THE PART PLAYED BY FRANCE
+
+Perhaps the next great flash as of lightning whereby we saw the drama
+of the past 365 days was that which revealed at its sublimest moment
+the part played by France. In those evil days of July 1914, when German
+diplomacy was carrying on the indecent pretence of quarrelling with
+France about Austria's right to punish Serbia for the assassination of
+the Archduke Ferdinand, there were Frenchmen still living who had vivid
+memories of three bloody campaigns. Some could remember the Crimean War.
+More could recall the Italian War of 1859, which brought the delirious
+news of the victory of Magenta, and closed with Solferino, and the
+triumphant march home through the Place de la Bastille, and down the Rue
+de la Paix. And vast numbers were still alive who could remember 1870,
+when the Emperor was defeated at Worth and conquered at Sedan; when
+Paris was surrounded by a Prussian army, when the booming of cannon
+could be heard on the boulevards; when tenderly nurtured women, who had
+never thought to beg their bread, had been forced by the hunger of their
+children to stand in long queues at the doors of the bakers' shops; when
+the city was at length starved into submission, and the proud French
+people, with their immemorial heritage of fame, were compelled to permit
+the glittering Prussian helmets to go shining down their streets.
+
+A new generation had been born to France since even the last of these
+events, but was it with a light heart that she took up the gage which
+Germany so haughtily threw down? Indeed, no! Never had France, the
+bright, the brilliant, the cheerful-hearted, shown the world a graver
+face.
+
+A few students across the Seine might shout "A Berlin! A Berlin!" just
+as our boys in khaki chalked up the same address on their gun carriages.
+Idlers in blouses along the quays might scream the "Marseillaise." Gangs
+of ruffians in back streets might break the windows of the shops of
+German tradespeople. Some bitter old campaigners might talk about
+revenge. But when the drums beat for the French regiments to start away
+for Alsace and the Belgian frontier, the heart of France was calm and
+steadfast.
+
+"This is a fight for the right, for France, and for the freedom of our
+souls!"
+
+
+
+
+THE SOUL OF FRANCE
+
+Then when the men had gone there came that anxious silence in which
+every ear was strained to catch the first cry from the army. Would it
+be victory or defeat? In the strength of her new-born spirit France was
+ready for either fate. The streets of Paris were darkened; the theatres
+were shut up; the cafes were ordered to close at nine o'clock; the sale
+of absinthe was prohibited that Frenchmen might have every faculty alert
+to meet their destiny; and the principal hotels were transformed into
+hospitals for the wounded that would surely come.
+
+They came. We were allowed to see their coming, and in those early days
+of the war, before the Red Cross companies had got properly to work,
+the return of the first of the fallen among the French soldiery made a
+terrible spectacle. At suburban stations, generally in the middle of
+the night, long lines of third-class railway carriages, as well as
+rectangular, box-shaped cattle wagons, such as in conscript countries
+are used for purposes of mobilization, would draw up out of the
+darkness.
+
+Instantly hundreds of pale, wasted, generally bearded, and often wounded
+faces would appear at the windows, crying out for coffee or chocolate.
+Then the cattle wagons would be unbolted, and the great doors thrown
+back, disclosing six or eight men in each, lying outstretched on straw,
+with their limbs swathed in blood-stained bandages, and their eyes
+glazed with pain. They were the brave fellows who, a few weeks before,
+had gone to Flanders in the pride and prime of their strength. In some
+cases they had lain like that for two whole days on their long way back
+from the fighting line, with no one to give them meat or drink, with
+nothing to see in the darkness of their moving tomb and nothing to hear,
+except the grinding of the iron wheels beneath them, and the cries of
+the comrades by their side.
+
+"Mon Dieu! Que de souffrances! Qui l'aurait cru possible? O mon Dieu,
+aie pitie de moi."
+
+
+
+
+THE MOTHERHOOD OF FRANCE
+
+Still the soul of France did not fail her. It heard the second approach
+of that monstrous Prussian horde, which, like a broad, irresistible
+tide, sweeping across one half of Europe, came down, down, down
+from Mons until the thunder of its guns could again be heard on the
+boulevards. And then came the great miracle! Just as the sea itself can
+rise no higher when it has reached the top of the flood, so the mighty
+army of Germany had to stop its advance thirty kilometres north of
+Paris, and when it stirred again it had to go back. And back and back it
+went before the armies of France, Britain, and Belgium, until it reached
+a point at which it could dig itself into the earth and hide in a long
+serpentine trench stretching from the Alps to the sea. Only then did
+the spirit of France draw breath for a moment, and the next flash as of
+lightning showed her offering thanks and making supplications before the
+white statue of Jeanne d'Arc in the apse of the great cathedral of Notre
+Dame, sacred to innumerable memories. On the Feast of St Michael 10,000
+of the women of Paris were kneeling under the dark vault, and on the
+broad space in front of the majestic facade, to call on the Maid of
+Orleans to % intercede with the Virgin for victory. It was a great and
+grandiose scene, recalling the days when faith was strong and purer.
+Old and young, rich and poor, every woman with some soul that was dear
+to her in that inferno at the front--the Motherhood of France was there
+to pray to the Mother of all living to ask God for the triumph of the
+right.
+
+"Jesus, hear our cry for our country! Justice for France, O God!"
+
+And in the spirit of that prayer the soul of France still lives.
+
+
+
+
+FIVE MONTHS AFTER
+
+The next of the flashes as of lightning that revealed the drama of the
+past 365 days came to us at Christmas. The war had then been going on
+five months, showing us many strange and terrible sights, but nothing
+stranger and more terrible than the changed aspect of warfare itself.
+A battlefield had ceased to be a scene of pomp and of personal prowess,
+with the charging of galloping cavalry, the clash of glittering arms,
+and the advancing and retiring of vast numbers of soldiery. It was now a
+broad and desolate waste, in which no human figure was anywhere visible
+as far as the eye could reach--a monstrous scar on the face of the
+globe, such as we see in volcanic countries, only differing in the
+evidence of design that came of long, parallel lines of turned-up soil,
+which were the trenches wherein hundreds of thousands of men lived
+under the surface of the ground. Over this barren waste there was almost
+perpetual smoke, and through the smoke a deafening cannonading, which
+came of the hurling through the air of scythes of steel, called shells.
+Sometimes the shells were burying themselves unbroken in the empty
+earth, but too often they were scouring the trenches, where they were
+bursting into jagged parts and sending up showers of horrible fragments
+which had once been the limbs of living men.
+
+Such was warfare by machinery as the world caught its first, full,
+horrified sight of it between the beginning of August and the end of
+December 1914. But even out of that maelstrom of horror there had been
+glimpses of great things--great heroisms, great victories, and great
+proofs of the power to endure. A rigid censorship, rightly designed to
+keep back from the enemy the information that would endanger the lives
+of our soldiers, was also keeping us in ignorance of many glorious
+incidents of the war such as would have thrilled us up to our throbbing
+throat. But some of them could not possibly be concealed, so we heard of
+the gallant stand of the dauntless sons of our daughter Canada, and we
+saw our great old warrior, Lord Roberts, going out to the front in his
+eighty-third year to visit his beloved Indian troops, dying as was
+most fit on the battlefield, within sound of the guns in the war he had
+foretold, and then being brought home, borne through the crowded streets
+of London and buried under the dome of St. Paul's, amid the homage of
+his Bang and people.
+
+
+
+
+THE COMING OF WINTER
+
+Then, as the year deepened towards winter, the rains came, torrential
+rains such as we thought we had never known the like of before. We
+heard that the trenches were flooded, and that our soldiers were eating,
+sleeping, and fighting ankle-deep (sometimes knee-deep) in water. At
+night, on going to our white beds at home, we had remorseful visions of
+those slimy red ruts in Flanders where our boys were lying out in the
+drenching rain under the heavy darkness of the sky. It was hard to
+believe that human strength could sustain itself against such cruel
+conditions, and indeed it often failed.
+
+Towards Christmas tens of thousands of our men had to be brought home
+to our hospitals, many of them wounded, but not a few suffering from
+maladies which made them unfit for military service. The accident of
+being asked to distribute presents enabled me to see and talk
+with hundreds of them. It was a sweet and exhilarating yet rather
+nerve-racking experience. These young fellows, who had looked on death
+in its most horrible aspects, having had it for their duty to kill as
+many Germans as possible, and then to eat and sleep as if nothing had
+occurred--had they been degraded, brutalized, lowered in the scale of
+human creatures by their awful ordeal?
+
+The sequel surprised me. The veil of mist with which a London winter
+enshrouds the beginnings of night and day had only just risen when on
+Christmas morning I reached the wounded soldiers' ward in the first of
+the hospitals I visited. The sweet place was decked out with holly
+and mistletoe. Forty or fifty men were lying there in their beds, some
+bandaged about the head, a few about the face, more about the body,
+arms, and legs. None of them seemed to be in serious pain, and nearly
+all were cheerful, even bright, boyish, and almost childlike. What
+stories they had to tell of the inferno they had come from! It was hell,
+infernal hell. They would go back, of course, when they were better, and
+had to do so, but if anybody said he _wanted_ to go back he was telling
+a damn'd lie.
+
+One boy, scarcely out of his teens, with soft, womanly eyes, light hair,
+and a face that made me sure he must be the living image of his mother,
+had had a narrow escape. After being wounded he had been taken prisoner
+to a farmhouse. Nobody there had done anything for him, and at length,
+after many hours, watching his opportunity, he had crept into the
+darkness and got back to the British trenches by crawling for nearly a
+quarter of a mile on hands and knees.
+
+Another young soldier, an Irishman, told me a brave story, such as might
+have been allowed, I thought, to scratch and scrape its way through the
+thorn hedge of the strictest censorship. It was a story of the great
+days before the armies had dug themselves into the earth like rabbits.
+Perhaps I had heard something about it? I had. Eight hundred of his
+cavalry regiment had ridden full gallop into a solid block of the enemy,
+making a way through them as wide as Sackville Street. At length the
+Germans in front had dropped their rifles and held up their hands,
+whereupon our men had ceased to slay. But, being unable to rein in their
+frantic horses, they had been compelled to gallop on. Then, while their
+backs were turned, the treacherous Huns had picked up their rifles and
+fired on them from behind, killing many of our best men.
+
+"And what did you do then?" I asked.
+
+"Turned back and----"
+
+"And what?"
+
+"Took one man alive, sor."
+
+"And the rest?"
+
+"Left them there, sor."
+
+"And how many of you got back?"
+
+"Less than two hundred, sor."
+
+
+
+
+CHRISTMAS IN THE TRENCHES
+
+Then Christmas in the trenches--we had glimpses of that, too. The people
+who governed nations from their Parliament Houses might have doubts
+about the peace-dream of the poets, the Utopia of universal brotherhood
+which gleams somewhere ahead in the far future of humanity, but the
+soldiers on the battlefields, even in the welter of blood and death had
+somehow heard the call of it.
+
+The appeal of the Pope for a truce to hostilities during the days
+sacred to the Christian faith had fallen on deaf ears in the Cabinets of
+Europe. In that zone of mutual deception which is another name for war,
+neither of the belligerents could trust the other not to take an unfair
+advantage of any respite from slaying that might be called in the name
+of Christ, and, therefore, the armies must continue to fight. But
+the men in the trenches had found for them-selves a better way. When
+Christmas Eve came they began--German and British--to talk about
+Christmas Eves which they had spent at home. Visions arose of crowded
+streets, of shops decorated with holly and mistletoe, of churches with
+little candle-lit Nativities, of Christmas-trees at home laden with
+fairy lamps and presents, of children sitting up late to dance and laugh
+and then hanging up their stockings before going to bed to dream of
+Santa Claus, of church bells ringing for midnight mass, and, last of
+all, of the "waits" by the old cross in the market-place in the midst of
+the winter frost and snow.
+
+Suddenly in one of the trenches some of the soldiers began to sing. They
+sang a Christmas carol, "While shepherds watched their flocks by night."
+The soldiers in the parallel trenches of the enemy heard it, knew what
+it was, and joined in with another Christmas carol, sung in their own
+language. In a little while both sides were singing, each in its turn,
+listening and replying, all along the two dark gullies that stretched
+across blood-stained Europe. Then Chinese lanterns were lit and stuck
+up on the head of the trenches, and salutations were shouted across the
+narrow ground between. "Merry Christmas to you, Fritz, old man!" "Same
+to you, Tommy!" And then next morning, Christmas morning, in the grey
+light of the late dawn, some daring soul, clambering over the trench
+head, marched boldly up to the line of the enemy with the salutation
+of the sacred day. In another moment everybody was up and out, shaking
+hands, and posing for photographs, friend and foe, German and British.
+
+After a while they became aware that the ground they were standing on
+was like an unroofed charnel-house, littered over with the bodies of
+their unburied dead. So they set themselves to cover up their comrades
+in the earth, never asking which was British and which German, but
+laying them all together in the everlasting brotherhood of death--that
+English boy whose mother was waiting for him in England, and this German
+lad whose young wife was weeping in his German home.
+
+My God, why do men make wars?
+
+
+
+
+THE COMING OF SPRING
+
+But perhaps, as Zola says, it is only the soft-hearted philosophers who
+are loud in their curses of war, and the truer wisdom was that of the
+stoical ancients, who could look with indifference on the massacre of
+millions. To keep manly, to remind ourselves that the generations come
+and go, that after all people die, and that more die one year than
+another--this should be the wise man's way of reconciling himself to the
+inhumanities of war. It is horrible doctrine, but certainly nature seems
+to speak with that voice, and hence the pang that came to us with the
+next great flash as of lightning, which showed us the battle-front at
+the beginning of the spring.
+
+The long lines in the West had hardly changed so much as a single point
+to north or south since October 1914. Yet what horrors of conflict
+the intervening months had witnessed, bloody in their progress, though
+barren in their results! The storms of the spring (which in much of
+Northern Europe is only another name for a second winter) had gone
+through it all. Our soldiers had suffered frightfully, and some of us at
+home, awakening in the middle of stormy nights, had thought we heard the
+booming of far-off guns under the thunder of the sky.
+
+Three millions of men were dead by this time, and that belt of green
+country, which many of us had crossed with light hearts a score of
+times, was nothing now but a vast graveyard stretching from the foot of
+the Swiss mountains to the margin of the North Sea. Here a charred and
+blackened mass of stones, which had once been a group of houses; there a
+cottage by the roadside, once sweet and pretty under its mantle of wild
+roses, now hideous with a gaping hole torn in its walls, and its little
+bed visible behind curtains that used to be white. And yet Nature was
+going on the same as ever--hardly giving a hint that the Great Death had
+passed that way. Our boys at the front wrote home that the leaves were
+beginning to show on the trees, that the grass was growing again, and
+that in the lulls of the cannonading they could hear the birds singing.
+
+
+
+
+NATURE GOES HER OWN WAY
+
+We found it heart-breaking. But it has been always so. I was in Naples
+during the whole period of the last great eruption of Vesuvius, and,
+looking through the gloom of the heavens, piled high with the whorls of
+fire and smoke that were covering the Vesuvian valleys and villages
+with a grey shroud, waist deep, of volcanic dust, I thought the face of
+Nature in that sweet spot could never be the same again; but when I
+went back to it a year later I could see no difference. I sailed south
+through the Straits of Messina a few weeks before the earthquake, and,
+returning north a few months later, I looked eagerly for the change
+which I imagined must have been made by the frightful upheaval of the
+earth that had killed hundreds of thousands, and shaken the soul of the
+entire human family, but I could see no change at all, even through
+the strongest field-glasses, until I came within sight of the waste
+and wreckage of the little works of men. Yes, Nature goes her own way,
+winter and summer, seedtime and harvest, healing her own wounds, but
+taking no thought of ours.
+
+Yet, cruel as Nature seemed to be at the beginning of the spring, it was
+not so cruel as man. With the better weather our enemies began to devise
+and put into operation new and more devilish methods of warfare. Perhaps
+this was a result of their fear, for there is no cruelty so cruel as
+the cruelty that comes of fear, and no inhumanity so inhuman. Having
+expressed themselves as shocked by our alleged use of dum-dum bullets,
+they were now ransacking their laboratory for gases that would burst
+the lungs of our soldiers, and for inflammable oils that would set
+them afire as if they were criminals tarred and feathered and tied to a
+stake. Their battleships, built to fight craft of their own kind, or at
+least fortresses capable of replying to their fire, were now sent out
+to bombard innocent watering-places lying breast open to the sea. Their
+air-craft, constructed for reconnaissances, were ordered to drop bombs
+out of the clouds on to sleeping cities in the darkness of the night.
+And their submarines, tolerated by international courts only as weapons
+of attack on warships, were authorized to sink harmless merchantmen,
+without any word of warning, or any effort to save life. Could
+scientific knowledge under the direction of moral insanity go one step
+farther? Flying in the highest sky, hiding behind the densest clouds,
+stealing across the heavens in the dark hours, dropping fireballs on to
+the silent earth, sneaking back in the dawn; and then sailing through
+the womb of the great deep, rising like a serpent to spit death at
+innocent ships, diving to avoid destruction and scudding away under
+cover of the empty sea--what a spectacle of divine power at the service
+of devilish passion! It was difficult to believe that our enemies had
+not gone mad. They were no longer fighting like men, but like demons.
+
+
+
+
+THE SOUL OF THE MAN WHO SANK THE _LUSITANIA_
+
+The crowning horror of Germany's barbarities came with the sinking of
+the _Lusitania_.
+
+Perhaps nothing less shocking could have made us see how much less
+cruel Nature is at her worst than man in his madness may be. Three years
+before the _Titanic_ had been sunk on a clear and quiet night, because
+a great iceberg formed in the frozen north had floated silently down
+to where, crossing the ship's course in mid-Atlantic, it struck her
+the slanting blow that sent her to the bottom. Thus a great, blind,
+irresistible force, operating without malice or design, had in that case
+destroyed more than a thousand human lives. But when the _Lusitania_
+was sunk in broad daylight, and nearly as many persons perished, it was
+because our brother man, in the bitterness of his heart and the cruelty
+of his fear, had been bent on committing wilful murder.
+
+What is the present state of the soul of the person who perpetrated that
+crime?
+
+Can he excuse himself on the ground that he was obeying orders, or does
+his conscience refuse to be chloroformed into silence by that hoary old
+subterfuge? When he first saw the great ship sailing up in the sunshine,
+its decks crowded with peaceful passengers, and he rose like a murderer
+out of his hiding-place in the bowels of the sea, what were the feelings
+with which he ordered the torpedo to be fired? When, having launched his
+bolt, he sank and then rose again, and heard the drowning cries of his
+victims struggling in the water, what were the emotions with which he
+ran away? And when he returned to tell his story of the work he had
+done, with what dignity of manhood did he hold up his head in the
+company of Christian men? God knows--only God and one of his creatures.
+
+
+
+
+THE GERMAN TOWER OF BABEL
+
+For the credit of human nature we feel compelled, in sight of such
+enormities, to go back to Mr. Maeterlinck's theory that invisible powers
+of evil are using man for the execution of devilish designs. But if so,
+they have had no mercy on their creatures. We read that when, in fear of
+another flood, not trusting the promises of the Almighty, the children
+of Noah began to build a Tower of Babel, the Lord sent a confusion of
+tongues among them to bring their design to destruction. The excuses
+the Germans have offered for their barbarities suggest a confusion of
+intellect that can only lead to a like result. Has the world ever before
+listened to such whirlwind logic?
+
+When a German submarine has sunk a British merchantman and left her crew
+to perish we have been told that she was performing a legitimate act of
+war. But when a British merchantman has mounted a gun in order to defend
+herself, she has been said to violate the law of nations. When British
+battleships have blockaded German ports they have been trying to starve
+sixty-five millions of German people. But when German submarines have
+attempted to blockade British ports by drowning a thousand passengers
+of many nations on a British liner, they have been executing a just
+revenge. When a neutral nation in Europe has supplied foodstuffs
+and materials of war to Germany, she has been doing an act of simple
+humanity. But when the United States has supplied foodstuffs and
+materials of war to Great Britain she has been breaking the laws of her
+neutrality. When a brutal German officer has shot a British civilian in
+a railway train he has committed a justifiable homicide and becomes a
+proper person for promotion. But when a Belgian civilian has killed a
+German soldier who violated his daughter before his eyes he has been
+guilty of assassination and quite properly shot at sight. When Germany
+has refused to honour her name to a "scrap of paper" she has been a holy
+martyr obeying a law of necessity. But when England has honoured hers
+she has been a holy humbug, whose hypocrisy deserved to be exposed.
+Therefore God punish England! Above all, when God has crowned the arms
+of Germany with success on the battlefield, his most Christian Majesty,
+William the Pious, has always been with Him. Therefore God bless the
+Kaiser!
+
+Surely confusion of intellect can go no further, and the German Tower of
+Babel must soon fall.
+
+
+
+
+THE ALIEN PERIL
+
+But out of this failure of logic on the part of "deep-thinking Germany"
+a danger came to us from nearer home than the battlefield. One of the
+most vivid flashes as of lightning whereby we have seen the drama of
+the past 365 days was that which, immediately after the sinking of the
+_Lusitania_, showed us the full depths of the "alien peril." Before the
+war we had had fifty thousand German-born persons living in our midst.
+They had enjoyed the whole freedom of our commerce, the whole justice of
+our law courts, and the whole protection of our police. Many of them had
+married our British women, who had borne them British children. Most of
+them had learned to speak our language, and some of us had learned to
+understand their own. A few had become British subjects, and many had
+been honoured by our King. Our music, literature, and art had become
+theirs. Shakespeare had, in effect, become a German poet, and Wagner
+a British composer. The barriers between our races had seemed to break
+down, and even such of us as had small hope of a golden age of universal
+brotherhood had begun to believe that marriage, mutual interest,
+education, and environment were making us one with these strangers
+within our gates.
+
+Then came a startling awakening. We realized beyond possibility of doubt
+that many thousands of our German aliens had been keeping up a dual
+responsibility, and that the chief of their two duties had been duty
+to their own country. We found beyond question that a settled system
+of espionage was at work in Great Britain, under the direction of the
+German authorities; that information which could only be of use in the
+event of invasion had for many years been gathered up by some of the
+people whom we had called our friends, and that day by day and hour
+by hour, as the war went on, secrets valuable to our enemy had been
+filtering through to Germany from influential places in this country.
+
+What a shock to our sense of security, our pride, and even our
+self-respect! The horror of the discovery reached its highest point at
+the time of the sinking of the great liner, for then it was realized
+that there could be no limit to the expression of German cruelty. It is
+one of the effects of the spirit of cruelty to strike its victims with
+moral blindness. If it were possible that the German conscience could
+justify murder on the sea, why should it not justify it on land? Why
+should not our German governesses burn down the houses in which our
+children lay asleep? Why should not a German secretary attempt to
+assassinate one of our public ministers? War was war, and whatever was
+necessary was right.
+
+"We are doing wrong, but it is necessary to do wrong, and necessity
+knows no law."
+
+
+
+
+HYMNS OF HATE
+
+About this time also we became conscious of a fierce, delirious,
+intoxicating hate of our people which was developing in the hearts of
+our enemies. Before the outbreaking of the war it had been Russia and
+the Russians who had (by inherited antipathy from the founder of the
+German Empire) been the chief objects of German hatred. Now it was
+Britain and the British. Hymns of Hate (our enemies called it "sacred
+hate") were composed, recited, and sung:
+
+     French and Russian, they matter not,
+     A blow for a blow, and a shot for a shot,
+     We love them not, we hate them not,
+     We love as one, we hate as one,
+     We have one foe, and one alone--
+                    England!
+
+England was not moved to retaliate in kind. We remembered what the
+German Churchmen had said about our Teutonic brotherhood, and allowed
+ourselves to believe that this was only the call of the blood in the
+German race--the mad, bad blood of fratricidal hate, the most devilish
+hate of all. We also reflected that it was a form of hatred not
+unfamiliar in asylums for the insane, where it has always been equally
+tragic and pitiful in its effects, and certain to recoil on the
+sufferer's own head. But as no sane father of a family would make
+free of his children's nursery the deranged relative who required the
+protection and restraint of the padded room, we decided that there
+was only one safe way with our aliens as a whole--to shut them up. God
+forbid that any of us should say that all our German aliens were under
+suspicion of criminal intentions. On the contrary, we know that some
+of them are among the sincere friends of Great Britain, passionately
+opposing Germany's objects in this war and loathing Germany's methods.
+We know, too, that a few belong to that rare company whose sympathies
+can rise even higher than nationality into the realm of "human empire."
+We also know that countless persons, long resident in this country, and
+deeply attached to the land of their adoption, have suffered unspeakable
+hardships from the accident of German origin. It is painful to think
+of some of the people who frequented our houses, whose houses we
+frequented, whose wives and children are our kindred, being shut
+up behind barbed wire in open encampments. But these are among the
+inevitable cruelties of a war for which we are not responsible. In
+putting the great body of our enemy aliens under control we did no more
+than our plain duty to the soldiers who were fighting for us at the
+front. What will happen to them (and us) when the war is over, and they
+come out of their prisons, none can say. It seems as if the world can
+never be the same place as before--the devil has played too hard a game
+with it.
+
+
+
+
+THE PART PLAYED BY RUSSIA
+
+And then Russia! Distance from the scene of action, the great length
+of the line of operations and the vast area behind it have made it
+difficult or impossible for us to see the drama of the Russian campaign
+as we have seen that of France, Belgium, and our own Empire. But we have
+seen something, and it has been enough to give the lie to certain of the
+emphatic protestations with which Germany made war. We had heard it said
+by the German Chancellor that the fact that Russia was mobilizing in
+those last days of July 1914 made it impossible for Germany to ask
+Austria to extend the time-limit imposed upon Serbia--a time-limit which
+would have been indecent among civilized people if it had concerned
+nothing more serious than the destruction of a kennel of dogs suspected
+of rabies. But all the world knows now that Russian mobilization was a
+process inevitably so slow that the German armies had flung themselves
+upon Belgium twelve days before the Russian advance began.
+
+Then we had heard it said by the German Churchmen that in taking
+the side of Russia we, British and French people, leaders among the
+enlightened races, were helping Muscovite barbarians to oppose the cause
+of civilization. But since Louvain, Termonde, and Rheims, not to
+speak of the unnameable iniquities of Liege, the world knows where
+the barbaric spirit of Europe had its central home--in Berlin, not in
+Petrograd; in the proud hearts of the German over-lords, not the meek
+ones of the Russian peasantry.
+
+
+
+
+THE SHADOW OF THE GREAT DEATH
+
+The truth, as everybody knows who knows Russia, is that "barbarous," the
+classic taunt of the German against Russia, is, of all words, the least
+proper as a description of the Russian mind and character. I have
+myself been only once in Russia, but it was on a long visit and under
+conditions which were calculated, beyond anything that has happened
+since down to to-day, to reveal to me the whole secret of the Russian
+soul, In 1892, when the cholera had come sweeping up from the south, I
+travelled for weeks that seemed like an eternity in the little towns
+of Galicia and the cities beyond the Russian frontier. The Great Death
+darkened my sky over many hundreds of miles of travel. I visited the
+plague spots where men's lives were being mown down at the devastating
+stride of 5000 deaths a week, and where men's hearts, the nerve,
+courage, sanity, and humanity of men, were being sapped and quenched and
+consumed by terror and panic and despair. I saw the Russian people under
+the black shadow and in the malign presence of the Great Death, living
+in the dark clouds of inquietude and dread and awe. And when my visit
+came to an end I left Russia with the feeling that, relatively short
+as my life among the Russian people had been, I knew them because I had
+been with them when their very souls lay bare.
+
+What, then, did I see? A barbaric people? No, a thousand times, no! I
+saw an uneducated people; a neglected people; a people badly fed, badly
+housed, and badly protected from the cruelties of a rigorous climate;
+but not a people who had naturally one barbaric impulse, if by that we
+mean the "will to life" which animates the savage man. And I now say,
+with all the emphasis of which I am capable, that the last reproach that
+can rightly be flung at the Russian people, even the least enlightened
+of them, the Russian peasants, in the darkest reaches of their vast
+country, is that they are barbarians. Deeds of cruelty and of barbarity
+there may be among the Russians, as there are among all peoples, and the
+dehumanizing conditions inevitable to warfare may perhaps increase the
+number of them, but the outrages of Louvain, Termonde, Rheims and Liege
+are morally and physically impossible to the Russian race.
+
+
+
+
+THE RUSSIAN SOUL
+
+The truth is, too, that there is not in the world a more religious
+people than the Russian--a people more submissive to what they conceive
+(not always wisely) to be the will of the Almighty, the governance of
+the unseen forces. As opposed to the average German intellect, which for
+the past fifty years has been struggling day and night to materialize
+the spiritual, the Russian intellect seems to be always trying to
+spiritualize the material. No one can doubt this who has seen the
+Russian peasants on their pathetic pilgrimages to the Holy Land,
+standing (among the lepers, uttering their clamorous lamentations)
+before the gates of the Garden of Gethsemane, or trooping in dense
+crowds down the steep steps to the underground Church of the Virgin. The
+literature of Russia, too, reflects this trait of the Russian soul, and
+not only in the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Tourgeneiff, Tolstoy,
+Repin, Dostoyevsky, and Glinka, or yet in Kuprine, Gorki, Anoutchin,
+Merejkowsky, and Baranovsky, but in those simpler and perhaps cruder
+writings which speak directly to uneducated minds, the same striving
+after the spiritual is everywhere to be seen. Books like Treitschke's,
+Nietzsche's, and Bernhardi's would be impossible in Russia, not, heaven
+knows, because of their "intellectual superiority," which is another
+name for braggadocio, but because of their moral insensibility, their
+glorification of the physical forces of the body of man, which the
+Russian mind sets lower than the unseen powers of his soul.
+
+
+
+
+THE RUSSIAN MOUJIK MOBILIZING
+
+So the flashes as of lightning that have shown us the part Russia has
+played in the drama of the past 365 days have revealed a people acting
+under something very like a religious impulse. We have seen the moujiks
+being mobilized in remote parts of the vast country, and have found it a
+moving picture. It is probable that the war had been going on for weeks
+before they heard anything about it. Almost certainly they had no clear
+idea of where the fighting was, or what it was about, the theatre of
+the struggle being so far away and their ignorance of the world outside
+their own little communities so profound and impenetrable. We may be
+sure that when the echo of the great war did at length reach them it
+was quite undisturbed by any foolish pretence associated with the
+assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand (that lie could only be expected
+to impose on the enlightened peoples of the West) and concerned itself
+solely with the safety of Russia. The humblest Russian is proud of
+Russia; proud that it is so big and powerful among the nations of the
+world. He will gladly die rather than see it made less, so deep is his
+devotion to the long-suffering giant whose blood is throbbing in his
+veins.
+
+Therefore when the call of war came to the moujiks in their far-off
+homes, we saw them answering it as if it had been the call of their
+faith. First a service in the village church; then a procession behind
+the village pope to the village shrine ("Now go away and fight for
+Russia, my children"), then the setting off for the distant railway
+station, the mothers and young wives of the soldiers marching for miles
+by their sides, carrying their rifles and haversacks along the wide
+roads white with dust. What scenes of human pathos! For a long time the
+officers are indulgent to irregularities--have they not just left their
+own dear women behind them?--but at length the word of command rings
+out, and everybody not connected with the army has to go back. Ah, those
+partings! Still, God is good! And hadn't Masha promised to burn a candle
+to the Virgin every day while her husband is away? Ivan will come back;
+yes, of course Ivan will come back, and by that time baby will be born,
+and then what joy, what lifelong happiness!
+
+
+
+
+HOW THE RUSSIANS MAKE WAR
+
+From some of the greater cities of Western Russia there came flashes
+of similar scenes. The memory of that time of the cholera is closely
+involved for me in the thought of these tragic days, and by the light of
+what I saw in Kief, in Sosnowitz, in Lublin, in Cracow, in Warsaw, and
+along the line of front in poor, stricken Poland, where, as I write, men
+are being mown down like grass, I seem to see what took place there
+at the beginning of August 1914, and is taking place now. I see the
+churches crowded and the congregations trailing out through the open
+porches into the churchyards around them. Old men and women who are too
+lame to struggle their way through the throng are lying under the open
+windows with their sticks and crutches stretched out beside them. Others
+outside are on their knees, following the services as they proceed
+within, clasping their hands, making the sign of the Cross, giving the
+responses, and joining in the singing.
+
+Inside the churches, where the women kneel on one side in their bright
+cotton head-scarves and the soldiers on the other in their long, dark
+coats, prayers are being said for Russia, that God will protect her and
+her "little Father," the Tsar, and all his faithful children, making the
+dark cloud that is on their horizon to pass them by unharmed. From porch
+to chancel they bend forward with their faces as near to the floor as
+their close crowding will permit. Then they sing. No one who has not
+been to Russia has ever heard such singing--no, not even in Rome in the
+Church of the Gesu as the clock strikes midnight on the last day of the
+year. There is no organ, and if there is a choir its voices are lost
+in the deep swell of the melancholy wail that rises from the people.
+Perhaps the morning is a bright one, and the sun is shining in dusty
+sheets of dancing light through the clerestory windows on to the altar
+ablaze with gold, twinkling behind its yellow candles and the bowed
+heads of the priests. When the service ends the soldiers form up
+in lines and march out through the kneeling crowds within and the
+overflowing congregations lying prone outside.
+
+So do the Russians make war. Not generally to the beating of drums, or
+yet the singing of their searching national anthem, and assuredly not
+as bloodhounds hunting for prey, but in the spirit of a simple people,
+often humble in their ignorance but always strong in their faith--in the
+certainty that there is something else in God's world besides greed and
+gold, something higher than "the will to power," something better for a
+nation than to enlarge its empire, and that is to possess its soul.
+
+And now in their hour of trial let us salute our brave Allies in the
+East. Let us assure them of the sincerity of our alliance. We rejoice
+in their victories. We count their triumphs as our own. When we hear
+of their reverses our hearts are full. We feel that out of the storm of
+battle a great new spirit has been born into Russia, awakening her
+from a sleep of centuries. We feel, too, that a great new spirit of
+brotherhood has been born into the world, uniting the scattered and
+divided parts of it, and that there is no more moving manifestation of
+the unity of mankind than the fact that the Russian and British peoples,
+after long years of misunderstanding, are now fighting for the same
+cause from opposite sides of Europe. May they soon meet and clasp hands!
+
+
+
+
+THE PART PLAYED BY POLAND
+
+And then Poland. Down to the end of the first year of war the part
+played by Poland has been that of absolute martyr. Like the water-mill
+in Zola's story she has first been disabled by the attack of her enemies
+and then destroyed by the defence of her friends. Three times the armies
+of the belligerents have rolled over her, and now that they are gone
+she lies stricken afresh, even yet more fiercely, under the famine and
+pestilence which have stalked in the wake of war.
+
+No more pitiful and abject picture does the terrible conflict present.
+Without part or lot in the European quarrel, with little to gain and
+everything to lose by it, having no such right of choice as gave glory
+to the martyrdom of Belgium, Poland has had nothing to do but to endure.
+
+At the beginning of the war, when the battery of Gerrman hatred was
+directed chiefly against Russia, the world was told that the measure of
+her barbarity was to be seen in the condition to which the Polish people
+had been reduced under Russian rule. But did the Harnacks, Hauptmanns,
+Ballins and von Buelows who put forth this plea, count on our ignorance
+of Galicia, in which the condition of the Poles is immeasurably more
+wretched under the rule of their Ally, Austria?
+
+In the fateful year 1892 I travelled much in Galicia, and saw something
+of the effects of Austrian government. My impressions of both were
+unfavorable. From points of natural wealth and beauty, Galicia is
+perhaps, of all countries, the least favoured of God. Shut out from
+the warm southern winds by the Carpathian mountains, and exposed to the
+northern blasts that sweep down from the broad steppes of Russia, the
+long and narrow stretch of Galician territory is probably the most
+inhospitable region in the western world Flat and featureless; with
+swampy and ague-stricken plains, unbroken by trees and hedges; with
+roads like canals, dissecting dreary wastes, black in the south, where
+the loam lies, light in the north where salt is found; with rivers
+without banks fraying into pools and ponds and marshes; with soppy
+fields in formal stripes like the patches of a patchwork quilt; with
+villages of log-houses, each having its cemetery a little apart, and its
+wooden crucifix like a gibbet at a space beyond--such is a great part of
+Galicia, the Polish province of Austria.
+
+But little as Nature has done to cheer the spirits of the Poles, who
+live under Austrian rule, what man has done is less. It is nothing at
+all, or worse than nothing.
+
+Thickly-sown on the eastern frontier are many densely populated
+manufacturing towns, ugly and squat, and giving the effect of standing
+barefoot on the damp earth. As you walk through them they look like
+interminable lines of featureless streets, full of those sweating,
+screaming, squabbling masses of humanity that take away all your pride
+in the dignity of man's estate. The prevailing colour is yellow, the
+dominant odour is noxious, the thoroughfares are narrow, and often
+unpaved. In the busier quarters the shops are sometimes spacious, but
+more frequently they are mere slits in the monotonous facades. When
+closed, as on Sunday, these slits give the appearance of a row of prison
+cells. When open they present crude pictures on the inner faces of
+their doors--pictures of boots, caps, trousers, stockings or corsets, a
+typology which seems to be more necessary than words to inhabitants who
+have not, as a whole, been taught to read.
+
+And then the people themselves! Perhaps there is not in all the world
+a more hopeless-looking race, with their lagging lower lips, their dull
+grey eyes, their dosy, helpless, exanimate expression, suggesting that
+the body is half asleep and the spirit no more than half awake. To see
+them slouching along the streets, or sitting in stupefied groups at the
+doors of brandy-shops, passing a single bottle from mouth to mouth, is
+to realize how low humanity may fall in its own esteem under the rule
+of an alien government. To watch them at prayer in their little Catholic
+churches is to feel that they have been made to think of themselves as
+the least of God's creatures, unworthy to come to His footstool--always
+ready to kiss the earth, and never daring to lift their eyes to heaven,
+having no right, and hardly any hope.
+
+Such are the poorer and more degraded of the Poles in the Austrian
+crownland of Galicia, which has lately been swept by war (along the
+banks of the Vistula, the Dniester, and the Bug), and is now perishing
+of hunger, and being devastated by disease. And when I ask myself what
+has been the root-cause of a degradation so deep in a people who once
+laboured for the humanities of the world and upheld the traditions of
+Culture, I find only one answer--the suppression of nationality! In that
+fact lies the moral of Galicia's martyrdom. Let Belgium's nationality
+be suppressed as Germany is now trying to suppress it, and her condition
+will soon be like that of Austrian Poland. You cannot expect to keep
+the body of a nation alive while you are doing your best to destroy its
+soul.
+
+
+
+
+THE SOUL OF POLAND
+
+It is a fearful thing to murder, or attempt to murder, the soul of a
+nation. The call that comes to a people's heart from the soil that gave
+them birth is a spiritual force which no conquering empire should dare
+to kill. How powerful it is, how mysterious, how unaccountable, and how
+infinitely pathetic! The land of one's country may be so bleak, so bare,
+so barren, that the stranger may think God can never have intended that
+it should be trodden by the foot of man, yet it seems to us, who were
+born to it, to be the fairest spot the sun shines upon. The songs of
+one's country may be the simplest staves that ever shaped themselves
+into music, yet they search our hearts as the loftiest compositions
+never can. The language of one's country (even the dialect of one's
+district) may be the crudest corruption that ever lived on human lips,
+yet it lights up dark regions of our consciousness which the purest of
+the classic tongues can never reach. Do we not all feel this, whatever
+the qualities or defects of our native speech--every Scotsman, every
+Irishman, every Welshman, nay, every Yorkshireman, every Lancashireman,
+every Devonshireman, when he hears the word and the tone which belong to
+his own people only? There are phrases in the Manx and the Anglo-Manx
+of my own little race which I can never hear spoken without the sense
+of something tingling and throbbing between my flesh and my skin. Why?
+Because it is the home-speech of my own island, and whatever she is,
+whatever fate may befall her, however she may treat me, she is my mother
+and I am her son.
+
+Such is the mighty and mysterious thing which we call a nation's
+soul. Nobody can explain it, nobody can account for it, but woe to the
+presumptuous empire which tries to wipe it out. It can never be wiped
+out. Crushed and trodden on it may be, as Austria has crushed and
+trodden on the soul of Austrian Poland, and as Germany has crushed and
+trodden on the soul of Prussian Poland, when they have fallen so low
+in the scale of civilized peoples as to flog Polish school children for
+refusing to learn their catechism and say their prayers in a language
+which they cannot understand. But to kill the soul of a nation is
+impossible. The German Chancellor could not do that when he violated the
+body of Belgium. And though Warsaw has fallen the fatuous Prince Leopold
+of Bavaria, with his preposterous proclamations, cannot kill the soul of
+Poland.
+
+At Cracow in 1892 I tried to buy for one of my children the little
+Polish national cap, but after a vain search for it through many
+shops (where I was generally suspected of being a spy for the Austrian
+police), the cap was brought to me at night, in my private room,
+by shopkeepers who had been afraid to sell it openly in the day.
+At Wieliezhe, I, with some forty persons of various nationalities
+(including the usual contingent of detectives), descended the immense
+and marvellous salt-mine which is now used as a show place for
+visitors. After passing, by the flare of torches, down long galleries
+of underground workings, we were plunged into darkness by a rush of wind
+over a subterranean river through which we had to shoulder our way on
+a raft. Then suddenly, no face being visible in that black tunnel under
+the earth, the Polish part of our company broke into a wild, fierce,
+frenzied singing of their national anthem which, in those days, they
+dare not sing on the surface and in the light: "Poland is not lost for
+ever; she will live once more."
+
+No, Poland is not lost for ever! She will live once more!
+
+
+
+
+THE OLD SOLDIER OF LIBERTY
+
+And Italy! Although it is only since May that Italy has stood by our
+side on the battle-front, in an effort to avert from the world a new
+military domination, we have known from the beginning that her heart was
+with the Allies, and she was willing to stake all, when her time came,
+for the same principles of humanity and freedom. A Roman friend tells me
+that he heard an Italian statesman say, "Italy always meant war." We can
+well believe it. We have believed it from the first. On one of the early
+days of August, when a British regiment was passing through the streets
+of London on its way to Charing Cross, it was noticed that an old man in
+a red shirt and a peaked cap was marching with a proud step by the side
+of our soldiers. He turned out to be a Garibaldian, who had been living
+many years in Soho. Having dug up from his time-eaten trunk the simple
+regimentals of the army of the Liberator, he had come out to walk with
+our boys on the first stage of their journey to France. In the person
+of that old soldier of liberty we saw and saluted Italy--Italy that had
+known what it was to make her own sacrifices for the right, and was now
+ready to show us her sympathy in this supreme crisis in our history.
+
+But she had a trying, almost a tragic, time. For ten long months she lay
+under the quivering wing of war, in danger of attack from our enemies,
+and liable to misunderstanding among ourselves. She was party to a
+Triple Alliance which, ironically enough, bound her (up to a point)
+to her historic adversary, Austria, as well as to that Germany whose
+emperors had again and again sent their legions south in vain efforts to
+rule even the papacy from across the Rhine.
+
+How that alliance came to be made, and remade, against the sympathies
+and aspirations of a free people is one of the mysteries of diplomacy
+which Italian history has yet to solve. Perhaps there was corruption;
+perhaps there was nothing worse than honest blundering; perhaps the
+frequent spectacular visits to Rome of the Kaiser William (who is almost
+Oriental in his "sense of the theatre," and knows better, perhaps, than
+any European sovereign since Napoleon how to apply it to real life)
+played upon the eyes of the Italian race, always susceptible to
+grandiose exhibitions of power and splendour. But we cannot forget the
+old Austrian sore, and we remember what Antonelli is reported to have
+said to Pius IX before the outbreak of the campaign of 1859: "Holy
+Father, if the Italians do not go out to fight Austria, I believe, on my
+honour, the nuns will do so."
+
+
+
+
+THE PART PLAYED BY ITALY
+
+The Triple Alliance was a secret document, but everybody knew that it
+required Italy to join with Austria and Germany in the event of their
+being compelled to engage in a defensive war. Therefore the first
+question for Italy was whether the war declared by Austria against
+Serbia and by Germany against Belgium, although apparently aggressive,
+was in reality defensive. There was a further question for Italy--what
+would happen to her if she decided against her Allies? She did decide
+against them, thereby giving the lie direct to the Harnacks, Hauptmanns,
+Ballins, and von Buelows who had been telling the neutral nations that
+the war had been forced upon Germany. By all the laws of nations Germany
+and Austria ought then, if they had honestly believed their own story,
+to have declared war on Italy. They preferred to wheedle her, to try to
+buy her, bribe her, corrupt her, body and soul.
+
+They failed. After flooding the peninsula with lying literature,
+directed chiefly against ourselves, Germany sent back to the Italian
+capital its most astute statesman, who was married to a much-admired
+Italian woman. It was all in vain. Italy knew her own mind and had made
+reckoning with her own heart. She had begun with contempt for the nation
+which could invade Serbia, under the pretence of avenging the murder
+of the Archduke Ferdinand, and with loathing for the other nation which
+could violate Belgium after it had sworn to protect her, and now she
+went on to hatred and horror of the perpetrators of the outrages in
+Liege, in Louvain, and in Rheims, that were scorching men's eyes in the
+name of war.
+
+Still, Italy, although separating herself from her former allies, was
+not yet taking sides against them. Why? If their war was an aggressive
+and unjustifiable one, why could not Italy say so at once with her sword
+as well as her pen? There was a period of uncertainty, impatience, even
+of misunderstanding among her own people. Whispers reached them that
+their King had said (he never had) that he had given his "kingly word"
+for it that if Italy could not fight with her former friends she should
+not fight against them. This was a blow to Italian aspirations, for
+Victor Emmanuel III is the best-beloved man in Italy, the father of his
+people, whose heads would bow before his will even though their hearts
+were torn.
+
+Then came negotiations with Austria about the restoration of provinces
+which had once belonged to Italy and were still inhabited by Italians.
+It looked like paltering and peddling, like sale and barter. The people
+were losing patience; they thought time was being wasted. Beyond the
+Alps men were dying for liberty in a mighty struggle against the worst
+tyranny that had ever threatened the world, yet Italy was doing nothing.
+
+But the people did not know all. Even then their country was already
+at war within the limits of her own frontier--silently in her tailors'
+workshops, where uniforms were being sewn for the immense army she was
+soon to call into the field, audibly in the forges of Milan and Terni,
+where vast quantities of munitions were being hammered out for a long
+campaign.
+
+
+
+
+HOW THE WAR ENTERED ITALY
+
+Then, by one of the most vivid, if pathetic, of the flashes as of
+lightning that have shown us the drama of the past 365 days, we saw the
+actual war come to Italy. It came in a profoundly impressive form--the
+dead body of young Bruno Garibaldi, grandson of the Liberator. Fighting
+for France, Bruno had fallen in a gallant charge at the front, and his
+brother, who was by his side, had carried his body out of the trenches
+and brought it home. We who know Rome do not need to be told how it
+was received there. We can see the dense mass of uncovered heads in the
+Piazza delle Terme, stretching from the doors of the railway station to
+the bronze fountain at the top of the Via Nazionale, and we can hear the
+deep swell of the Garibaldian hymn, which comes like a challenge as
+well as a moan from 50,000 throats. Not for the first time was a dead
+Garibaldi being borne through the streets of Rome, and those of us who
+remembered the earlier day knew well that with the body of this Italian
+boy the war had entered Italy.
+
+Then, at a crisis in Italy's internal government, our enemy, having
+failed to buy, bribe, or corrupt Italy, began to threaten her. Out of
+the delirium of his intoxicated conscience, which no longer shrank from
+crime, he told Italy that if she dared to break her neutrality her
+fate should be as the fate of Belgium. That frightened some of us for
+a moment. We thought of Venice, of Florence, of Assisi, of Subiaco, of
+Naples, and of Rome, and, remembering the methods by which Germany was
+beating and bludgeoning her way through the war, our hearts trembled
+and thrilled at a dreadful vision of the lovely and beloved Italian
+land under the heel of a ruthless aggressor--of the destruction of the
+history of Christendom as it had been written by great artists on canvas
+and by great architects in stone through the long calendar of nearly two
+thousand years. But we also thought of Savoy, of Palestro, of Cas-ale,
+of Caprera, and of "Roma o morte," and told ourselves that, come what
+might, victory or defeat, the children of Victor Emmanuel III would
+never allow themselves to buy the ease and safety of their bodies by the
+corruption and degradation of their souls.
+
+
+
+
+THE ITALIAN SOUL
+
+That was the great and awful hour when Italy stood on the threshold
+of her fate; but though Great Britain's heart was bleeding from the
+sacrifices she had already made, and had still to make, and though
+Italy's intervention meant so much to us, we did not feel that we had a
+right to ask for it. And neither was it necessary that we should do so.
+The treaty that bound Italy to England was not written on a scrap
+of paper. It was in our blood, born of our devotion to humanity, to
+justice, to liberty, and to the memory of our great men. Therefore,
+with the world in arms about her, let Italy do what she thought best for
+herself, and the bond between us would not be broken!
+
+How the sequel has justified our faith! And when the great hour struck
+at last, after ten months of suspense, and Italy--ready, fully equipped,
+united--found the voice with which she proclaimed war, what a voice it
+was! Eloquent voices she had had throughout, in her Press as well as in
+her legislative chambers--Morelli's, Barzini's, Albertini's, Malagodi's,
+not to speak of Sartorio's, Ferrero's, Annie Vivantes, and many
+more--but it quickens my pulse to remember that it was the voice of a
+poet which at the final moment was to speak for the Italian soul.
+
+Friends newly arrived from Italy tell me that not even in Rome (where
+one always feels as if one were living on the borderland of the old
+world and the new, with thousands of years behind and thousands of years
+in front) can anybody remember anything so moving as the substance and
+the reception of Gabriele d'Annunzio's speech from the balcony of the
+Hotel Regina. We can well imagine it. The spirit of Time itself could
+have found no greater scene, no more thrilling moment. The broad highway
+on the breast of the hill going up to the Porta Pinciana, faced by the
+palace of the Queen Mother and flanked by the gardens of the Capuchin
+monastery, with the Colosseum, the Capitol and the Forum almost visible
+to the right--what a theatre to speak in!
+
+There were 5000 persons below, all "Romans of Rome," and the Queen
+Mother was on her balcony. But the orator was worthy of his audience,
+and his theme. He had the past for his prologue, and the future for his
+epilogue. Caesar, Brutus, Cicero, the story of the old oppression from
+which the world had freed itself after agelong tribulation, and then a
+picture of the new tyranny that was sweeping down from across the Rhine.
+What wonder if the warm-hearted Roman populace, to whom patriotism is
+a religion, were carried away by an appeal which seemed to come to them
+with the voice of Dante, Mazzini, Carducci, and Garibaldi from the very
+earth beneath their feet!
+
+So on May 20,1915, knowing well what the terrors of war were, and how
+remote the prospects of early victory, Italy took her place in arms
+by the side of the Allies. And now the heart of old Rome, so long
+perturbed, is tranquil. With heroic confidence she relies on her brave
+sons, led by her dauntless King, to justify her. And when she hears the
+truculent boast of our enemy that after he has disposed of Russia, he
+will destroy Italy as a power in Europe, she answers calmly, "Yes, when
+the last Roman capable of bearing arms lies dead in Roman soil--perhaps
+then, but not sooner."
+
+
+
+
+THE PART PLAYED BY THE NEUTRAL NATIONS
+
+And then the neutral countries--what is the part which they have played
+in the drama of the past 365 days? I think I may fairly claim to have
+had better opportunities than most people for studying one aspect of it,
+its moral aspect, and therefore I trust I may be forgiven if I make
+a personal reference. Seeing, in the earliest days of the war, that
+Germany was doing her best to divert the eye of the world from the crime
+she had committed in Belgium, and being convinced that Britain's hope
+both now and in the future lay in keeping the world's eye fixed on
+that outrage, I moved the proprietors of the _Daily Telegraph_ to the
+publication of "King Albert's Book."
+
+What that great book was it must be quite unnecessary to say, but it may
+be permitted to the editor to claim that it constituted the first (as it
+may well be the final) impeachment of the Kaiser before the bar of the
+nations for a crime in Belgium as revolting as that of Frederick the
+Great in Silesia and a thousandfold more fatal. After the publication
+of "King Albert's Book," Germany knew that before the tribunal of the
+civilized world she stood tried and condemned. But though representative
+men and women in thirteen different countries united within the
+covers of the historic volume to express their abhorrence of Germany's
+iniquity, the whole weight of the world's condemnation could not be
+included.
+
+From many of the neutral nations there came pathetic cries of inability
+to join in the general protest. Famous men wrote that the neutrality of
+their countries imposed upon them the duty and the penalty of silence.
+"My brother is a member of our Government," wrote one illustrious man
+of letters, "and if I am not to get him into trouble I must hold my
+tongue." Another, whose German name, if it could be published, would
+carry weight throughout the world, said: "I know where my sympathy lies,
+and so do you, but I dare not speak, for I am a German-born subject, and
+to tell what is in my mind would be treason to my country." This message
+came from a remote place in Spain, the writer having been compelled
+to fly from France, because his blood was German, while unable to take
+refuge in Germany because his heart was French.
+
+
+
+
+THE PART PLAYED BY THE UNITED STATES
+
+Perhaps the most tragic of these vistas of the sufferings of great souls
+in neutral countries came from the United States. Profoundly affecting
+were nearly all President Wilson's public utterances, even when, as
+sometimes occurred, our sympathy could not follow them. And certainly
+one of the most vivid of the flashes as of lightning, whereby we have
+seen the war in its moral aspect, was that which showed us the United
+States, at his proclamation, arresting for a whole day, on October 4,
+1914, the immense and tumultuous activities of her vast continent in
+order to intercede with the Almighty to vouchsafe healing peace to His
+striving children.
+
+It was a great and impressive spectacle. As I think of it I seem to feel
+the quieting of the headlong thoroughfares of Chicago, the hushing of
+the thud and drum of the overhead railways in New York, and then the
+slow ringing of the bells in the square tower of that old Puritan Church
+in Boston--all calm and peaceful now as a New England village on Sunday
+morning.
+
+But truth to tell we of the belligerent countries were not deeply moved
+or comforted by America's prayers. We thought our cause was that of
+humanity, and the sure way to establish it was by protest as well as
+prayer. We did not ask or desire that America should take up arms by
+our side. We did not wish to enlarge the area of the conflict that was
+deluging Europe in blood. Confident in the justice of our cause, we
+thought we knew that by the help of the Lord of Hosts, and by the
+strength of His stretched-out arm, the forces of the Allies would be
+sufficient for themselves. Neither did we wish to make a parade of our
+wounds to excite America's pity. With all our souls we believed that for
+every drop of innocent blood that was being shed outside the recognized
+area of battle the Avenger of blood would yet exact an awful penalty.
+But when humanity was being openly outraged, and conventions to which
+America had set her seal were being flagrantly violated, we thought,
+with Mr. Roosevelt, that it was the duty of the United States, as a
+Christian country, to step in with the expression of her deep and just
+indignation.
+
+America was long in doing that. But, thank God, she did it at last,
+and for the courage and strength of the Notes which President Wilson
+(speaking with a voice that is no unworthy echo of the great one that
+spoke at Gettysburg) has lately sent to Germany on the sinking of the
+_Lusitania_, and the outrage thereby committed on the laws of justice
+and humanity, which are immutable, the whole civilized world (outside
+the countries of our enemies) now salutes the United States in respect
+and reverence.
+
+
+
+
+THE THUNDERCLAP THAT FELL ON ENGLAND
+
+Among the flashes as of lightning that revealed to us the drama of
+the past 365 days, some of the most vivid were those that lit up the
+condition at home towards the end of Spring. The war had been going on
+ten months when it fell on our ears like a thunderclap that all was not
+well with us in England. In the ominous unrest that followed there
+was danger of serious division, with the risk of a breakdown in that
+national unity without which there could be no true strength. The result
+was a Coalition Government, uniting all the parties save one, followed
+by an appeal to the patriotism of the people through their purse.
+
+Never before had Great Britain witnessed such a response to her call.
+The first Cabinet in England that aimed at coalition had broken down in
+personal corruption, but the Cabinet now called into being was beyond
+the suspicion of even party interest. The first appeal to the purse
+of the British people had yielded one hundred and thirty millions in a
+year, but the appeal now made yielded six hundred millions in a month.
+It was almost as if Great Britain had ceased to be a nation and become a
+family.
+
+Nor did the industries of the country, in spite of the lure of drink and
+the temptation to strikes, fall behind the spirit of the people. At the
+darkest moment of our inquietude the call of health took me for a tour
+in a motor-car over fifteen hundred miles of England, and though my
+journey lay through three or four of the least industrial and most
+placid of our counties, I found evidences of effort on every hand, The
+high roads were the track of marching armies of men in training; the
+broad moors were armed camps; the little towns were recruiting stations
+or depots for wagons of war; the land lay empty of workers with the hay
+crop still standing for want of hands to cut it, and the villages seemed
+to be deserted save by little children and the feeble, old men, who had
+nothing left to do but to wait for death.
+
+The voice of the great war had been heard everywhere. From the remote
+hamlet of Clovelly the young men of the lifeboat crew had left for the
+front, and if the call of the sea came now it would have to be answered
+by sailors over sixty. In Barnstaple two large boardings on the face of
+a public building recorded in golden letters the names of the townsmen
+who had joined the colours. In every little shop window along the high
+road to Bath there were portraits of the King, Kitchener, Jellicoe,
+French, and Joffre, flanked sometimes by pictures of poor, burnt and
+blackened Belgium.
+
+On the edge of Dartmoor, in Drake's old town, Tavistock, I saw a
+thrilling sight--thrilling yet simple and quite familiar. Eight hundred
+men were leaving for France. In the cool of the evening they drew up
+with their band, four square in the market-place under the grey walls of
+the parish church, a thousand years old. The men of a regiment remaining
+behind had come to see their comrades off, bringing their own band
+with them. For a short half-hour the two bands played alternately,
+"Tipperary," "Fall In," "We Don't want to Lose You," and all the other
+homely but stirring ditties with which Tommy has cheered his soul. The
+open windows round the square were full of faces, the balconies were
+crowded, and some of the townspeople were perched on the housetops.
+Suddenly the church clock struck eight, the hour for departure; a bugle
+sounded; a loud voice gave the word of command like a shot out of a
+musket; it was repeated by a score of other sharp voices running down
+the line, and then the two bands, and the men, and all the people in
+the windows, on the balconies and on the roofs (except such of us as had
+choking throats) played and sang "For Auld Lang Syne." Was the spirit of
+our mighty old Drake in his Tavistock town that day?
+
+"Come on, gentlemen, there's time to finish the game, and beat the
+Spaniards, too!"
+
+
+
+
+A GLIMPSE OP THE KING'S SON
+
+One glimpse at the end of my little motor tour seemed to send a flash of
+light through the drama of the past 365 days. It was of our young Prince
+of Wales, home for a short holiday from the front. I had seen the King's
+son only once before--at his investiture in Carnarvon Castle. How long
+ago that seemed! In actual truth "no human creature dreamt of war" that
+day, although the shadow of it was even then hanging over our heads.
+
+Some of us who have witnessed most of the great pageants of the world
+thought we had never seen the like of that spectacle--the grey old
+ruins, roofless and partly clothed by lichen and moss, the vast
+multitude of spectators, the brilliant sunshine, the booming of the
+guns from the warships in the bay outside, the screaming of the seagulls
+overhead, the massed Welsh choirs singing "Land of my Fathers," and,
+above all, the boy of eighteen, beautiful as a fairy prince in his blue
+costume, walking hand in hand between the King and Queen to be presented
+to his people at the castle gate.
+
+And now he was home for a little while from that blackened waste across
+the sea, which had been trodden into desolation under the heel of a
+ruthless aggressor and was still shrieking as with the screams of hell.
+He had gone there willingly, eagerly, enthusiastically, doing the work
+and sharing the risk of every other soldier of the King, and he would
+go back, in another few days, although he had more to lose by going than
+any other young man on the battle-front--a throne.
+
+But if he lives to ascend it he will have his reward. England will not
+forget.
+
+When we hear people say that Great Britain is not yet awake to the fact
+that she is at war I wonder where they keep their eyes. If I had been a
+Rip Van Winkle, suddenly awakened after twenty years of sleep, or yet
+an inhabitant of Mars dropped down on our part of this planet, I think
+I should have known in any five minutes of any day since August 5, 1914,
+that Great Britain was at war. Such a spirit has never breathed through
+our Empire during my time, or yet through any other empire of which I
+have any knowledge. Everybody, or almost everybody, doing something for
+England, and few or none idle who are of military age except such as
+have heavy burdens or secret disabilities into which I dare not pry.
+
+It is not alone in Flanders or on the North Sea that our country's
+battle is being fought, and when I think I hear the hammering on ten
+thousand anvils in the forges of Woolwich, Newcastle, and Glasgow, and
+the thud of picks in the coal and iron mines of Cardiff, Wigan, and
+Cleator Moor, where hundreds of thousands of men are working long shifts
+day and night, half-naked under the fierce heat of furnaces, sometimes
+half choked by the escaping fumes of fire-damp, I tell myself it is
+not for me, too old for active service and only able to use a pen, to
+dishonour England, and her Empire, in the presence of her Allies, or
+weaken her in the face of her enemies, by one word of complaint against
+the young manhood of my country.
+
+
+
+
+THE PART PLAYED BY WOMAN
+
+The latest and perhaps the most vivid of the flashes as of lightning
+which have revealed the drama of the past 365 days has shown us the
+part played by woman. What a part that has been! Nearly always in
+the histories of the great world-wars of the past the sympathy of the
+spectator has been more or less diverted from the unrecorded martyrdom
+of the myriads of forgotten women who have lost sons and husbands by
+the machinations of the few vain and selfish women who have governed
+continents by playing upon the passions of men. Thank God, there has
+been nothing of that kind in this case. On the contrary, woman's part
+in this red year of the war has been one of purity, sacrifice, and
+undivided glory.
+
+Towards the end of it we saw a procession through the streets of London
+of 30,000 women who had come out to ask for the right to serve the
+State. I do not envy the man who, having eyes to see, a heart to feel,
+and a mind to comprehend, was able to look on that sight unmoved. Every
+class of woman was represented there, the gently-born, the educated, and
+the tenderly-nurtured, as well as the humbly-born, the uneducated, and
+the heavily-burdened, the woman with the delicate, spiritual face, as
+well as the woman with the face hardened by toil. And they were marching
+together, side by side, with all the barriers broken down. It was not
+so much a procession of British women as a demonstration of British
+womanhood, and it seemed to say, "We hate war as no man can ever hate
+it, but it has been forced upon us all, so we, too, want to take our
+share in it."
+
+
+
+
+THE WORD OF WOMAN
+
+But long before July 17, 1915, woman's part in this war began. It began
+on August 5, 1914, when the first hundred thousand of our voluntary army
+sprang into being as by a miracle. The miracle (if I am asked to account
+for it) had its origin in the word of woman. Without that word we should
+have had no Kitchener's Army, for "on the decision of the women, above
+everything else, lay the issues of the men's choice." {*}
+
+     * The Times.
+
+It needs little imagination to lift, as it were, the roofs off a hundred
+homes, and see and hear what was going on there in those early days
+of the war, after the clear call went out over England, "Your King and
+Country need you."
+
+In the little house of a City clerk, married only a year before, the
+young wife is saying, "Yes, I think you ought to go, dear. It's rather
+a pity, so soon after the boy was born... just as you were expecting
+a rise, too, and we were going to move into that nice cottage in the
+garden suburb. But, then, it will be all for the best, and you mustn't
+think of me."
+
+Or perhaps it is early morning in the flat of a young lawyer on the day
+he has to leave for the front. He is dressed in his khaki, and his
+wife, who is busying about his breakfast, is rising to a sublime but
+heartbreaking cheerfulness for the last farewell. "Nearly time for you
+to go, Robert, if you are to get to the barracks by six.... Betty? Oh,
+no, pity to waken her. I'll kiss her for you when she awakes and say
+daddy promised to bring her a dolly from France.... Crying? Of course
+not I Why should I be crying?... Good-bye then I Good-bye!..."
+
+Or perhaps it is evening in a great house in Belgravia, and Lady
+Somebody is saying adieu to her son. How well she remembers the day
+he was born! It was in May. The blossom was out on the lilacs in the
+square, and all the windows were open. How happy she had been! He had
+a long fever, too, when he was a child, and for three days Death had
+hovered over their house. How she had prayed that the dread shadow would
+pass away! It did, and now that her boy has grown to be a man he comes
+to her in his officer's uniform to say,... Ah, these partings! They
+are really the death-hours of their dear ones, and the women know it,
+although, like Andromache, they go on "smiling through their tears."
+
+With what brave and silent hearts they face the sequel too! The mother
+of Sub-Lieutenant So-and-So receives letters from him nearly every other
+week. Such cheerful little pencil scribblings! "Dearest Mother, I have a
+jolly comfortable dug-out now--three planks and a truss of straw, and I
+sleep on it like a top." Or, perhaps, "You see they have sent me back to
+the Base after six weeks under fire, and now I have a real, _real_ room,
+and a real, _real_ bed!" The dear old darling! She puts her precious
+letters on the mantelpiece for everybody to see, and laughs over them
+all day long. But when night comes, and she is winding the clock before
+going upstairs, thinking of the boy who not so long ago used to sleep on
+her knees.... "Ah, me!"
+
+And then the final trial, the last tragic test--the women are equal to
+that also. First, the letter in the large envelope from the War
+Office: "Dear Madam, the Secretary of State regrets to inform you that
+Lieutenant So-and-So is reported killed in action on... Lord Kitchener
+begs to offer you..." And then, a little later, from the royal palace:
+"The King and Queen send you their most sincere...." Oh, if she could
+only go out to the place where they have laid... But then the Lord will
+know where to find His Own!
+
+Somebody in Paris said the other day, "No one will ever make our women
+cry any, more--after the war." All the springs of their tears will be
+dry.
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW SCARLET LETTER
+
+It is brave in a man to face death on the battlefield, instantaneous
+death, or, what is worse, death after long suffering, after lying
+between trenches, perhaps, on the "no-man's ground" which neither friend
+nor foe can reach, grasping the earth in agony, seeing the dark night
+coming on, and then dying in the cold shiver of the dawn. Yes, it is
+brave in a man to face death like that. But perhaps it is even braver in
+a woman to face life, with three or four fatherless children to provide
+for, on nothing but the charity of the State. Then battle is in the
+blood of man, and the heroic part falls to him by right, but it is not
+in the blood of woman, who shrinks from it and loathes it, and yet such
+is her nature, the fine and subtle mystery of it, that she flies to
+the scene of suffering with a bravery which far out-strips that of the
+man-at-arms.
+
+On the breasts that have borne tens of thousands of the sons who have
+fallen in this war the Red Cross is now enshrined. It is the new scarlet
+letter--the badge not of shame, but glory. And "through the rolling of
+the drums" and the thundering of the guns a voice comes to us in this
+year of service and sacrifice whose message no one can mistake. Woman,
+who faces death every time she brings a man-child into the world,
+must henceforth know what is to be done with him. It is her right, her
+natural right, and the part she has taken in this war has proved it.
+
+
+
+
+AND... AFTER?
+
+Such is the drama of the war as I have seen it. How far it has gone,
+when it will close and the curtain fall on it none of us can say. With
+five millions already dead, twice as many wounded, one kingdom in ruins,
+another desolate from disease, the larger part of Europe under arms,
+civil life paralysed, social existence overshadowed by a mourning
+that enters into nearly every household; with a war still in progress
+compared with which all other wars sink into insignificance; with
+a public debt which Pitt, Fox, and Burke (who thought L240,000,000
+frightful) would have considered certain to sink the ship of State; with
+taxation such as our fathers never conceived possible--what will be our
+condition when this hideous war comes to an end?
+
+It is dangerous to prophesy, but, as far as we can judge, the least of
+the results will be that we shall all be poorer; that great fortunes
+will have diminished and vast enterprises disappeared; that what remains
+of our savings will have a different value; that some of us who thought
+we had earned our rest will have to go on working; that the industrial
+classes will have a time of privation; and that (most touching of human
+tragedies) the old and helpless and dependent among the very poor will
+more than ever feel themselves to be in the way, filling the beds and
+eating the bread of the children.
+
+Yet none can say. It is one of the paradoxes of history that after
+the longest and most exhausting wars the accumulation of the largest
+national debts and the imposition of the heaviest taxations, nations
+have rapidly become rich. Although 1817 was a time of extreme distress
+in these islands, England prospered after the Napoleonic wars. Although
+1871 was a time of fierce trial in Paris, yet France recovered herself
+quickly after the war with Germany. And though the Civil War in America
+left poverty in its immediate trail, the United States have since
+amassed boundless wealth.
+
+So do the nations, generation after generation, renew their strength
+even after the most prolonged campaigns. But beyond the economic loss
+there will in this case be the physical loss of ten millions, perhaps,
+of the young manhood of Europe dead, and ten other millions permanently
+disabled, with all the injury to the race thereby resulting; and beyond
+the physical loss there will be the intellectual loss in the ruthless
+destruction of those ancient monuments which had linked us with the
+past; and beyond the intellectual loss there will be the moral loss in
+the uprooting of that sympathy of nation with nation which had seemed to
+unite us with the future. As a consequence of this war a great part of
+Europe will be closed to some of us for the rest of our natural lives,
+and the world will contain more than a hundred millions fewer of our
+fellow-creatures in whose welfare we shall take joy.
+
+
+
+
+WAR'S SPIRITUAL COMPENSATIONS
+
+But, thank God, there is another side to the picture, both for young and
+old. If we are to be poorer we shall be more free. If we are to be weak
+and faint from loss of blood we shall rest at night without dread of
+that shadow of the sword which has darkened the sleep of humanity for
+forty years. If the countries of our enemies are to be closed to some
+of us in the future, the countries of our Allies will be more than ever
+open; nay, they will be almost the same to us as our own. France will be
+our France, Italy our Italy, Belgium our Belgium, and the next time I,
+for one, sit by the stove in the log cabin of a Russian moujik on the
+Steppes, I shall feel as if I were in the thatched cottage of one of my
+own people in our little island in the Irish Sea. So does blood shed
+in a common cause break down the barriers of race and language and bind
+together the children of one Father. The dead of our Allies become our
+dead, and our dead theirs. That Frenchman died to save my son; therefore
+he is my brother, and France is my country. "One's country is the place
+where they lie whom we loved."
+
+Thus war, brutal, barbarous war, has its spiritual compensations, and
+pray heaven the present one may prove to have more than any other. If it
+does not, something will break in us after all we have gone through. Our
+faith in the invisible powers to bring a good end out of all this welter
+of blood and destruction has become a religion. It must not fail us if
+our souls are to live.
+
+
+
+
+LET US PRAY FOR VICTORY
+
+"It is good to pray for peace, but it is better to pray for justice. It
+is better to pray for liberty. It is better to pray for the triumph of
+the right, for the victory of human freedom." {*}
+
+     * New York Times.
+
+Then let us pray for victory over our enemies, having no qualms, no
+shame, and no remorse. We know that Christ pronounced a death sentence
+on war, and that as soon as Christianity shall have established an
+ascendancy war will cease. But if anybody tells us in the meantime that
+by Christ's law we are to stand aside while a strong Power, which is in
+the wrong, inflicts frightful cruelties upon a weak Power which is in
+the right, let us answer that we simply don't believe it. If anybody
+tells us that by Christ's law we are to permit ourselves to be trodden
+upon and trampled out of being by an empire resting on violence, let
+us answer that we simply don't believe it. If anybody tells us that by
+Christ's law we are not to oppose the gigantic ambition of a "War
+Lord" who claims Divine right to stalk over Europe in scenes of blood,
+rapacity, and impurity, let us answer that we simply don't believe
+it. If anybody tells us that Christ's words, "Resist not evil," were
+intended to say that spiritual forces will of themselves overcome all
+forms of war (including, as they needs must, crime, disease, and death)
+let us answer that we simply don't believe it.
+
+Such a clumsy and dangerous interpretation of Christ's doctrine would
+put an end to government, to science, and to literature, and allow the
+worst elements of human nature to rule the world. It would also put
+Christianity on the scrap-heap--Christianity "with its benevolent
+morality, its exquisite adaptation to the needs of human life, the
+consolation it brings to the house of mourning and the light with which
+it brightens the mystery of the grave." {*}
+
+     *Macaulay.
+
+God forbid that the very least of us should say one word that would
+prolong the horrors of this terrible war. But it is just because we hate
+war that at the end of these 365 days we still think we must carry it
+on. It is just because our hearts are bleeding from the sacrifices we
+have made, and have still to make, that we feel they must be compelled
+to bleed.
+
+Let us, then, pray with all the fervour of our souls for Belgium, for
+Poland, for Italy, for Russia, for France, but above all, for our own
+beloved country, mother of nations, mother, too, of some of the bravest
+and best yet born on to the earth, that as long as there remains one man
+or woman of British blood above British soil this England and her Empire
+may be ours--ours and our children's.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Drama Of Three Hundred &
+Sixty-Five Days, by Hall Caine
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+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DRAMA OF 365 DAYS ***
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