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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The World Decision, by Robert Herrick
+
+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 World Decision
+
+Author: Robert Herrick
+
+Posting Date: October 20, 2012 [EBook #8529]
+Release Date: July, 2005
+First Posted: July 20, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD DECISION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eric Eldred, Anne Reshnyk, Charles Franks, and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WORLD DECISION
+
+BY
+
+ROBERT HERRICK
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+_PART ONE--ITALY_
+
+  I.  ITALY HESITATES
+
+ II.  THE POLITICIAN SPEAKS
+
+III.  THE POET SPEAKS
+
+ IV.  THE PIAZZA SPEAKS
+
+  V.  ITALY DECIDES
+
+ VI.  THE EVE OF THE WAR
+
+
+_PART TWO--FRANCE_
+
+  I.  THE FACE OF PARIS
+
+ II.  THE WOUNDS OF FRANCE
+
+III.  THE BARBARIAN
+
+ IV.  THE GERMAN LESSON
+
+  V.  THE FAITH OF THE FRENCH
+
+ VI.  THE NEW FRANCE
+
+
+_PART THREE--AMERICA_
+
+  I.  WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO US?
+
+ II.  THE CHOICE
+
+III.  PEACE
+
+
+
+
+THE WORLD DECISION
+
+
+PART ONE--ITALY
+
+
+I
+
+
+_Italy Hesitates_
+
+Last April, when I left New York for Europe, Italy was "on the verge"
+of entering the great war. According to the meager reports that a strict
+censorship permitted to reach the world, Italy had been hesitating for
+many months between a continuance of her precarious neutrality and joining
+with the Allies, with an intermittent war fever in her pulses. It was
+known that she was buying supplies for her ill-equipped army--boots and
+food and arms. Nevertheless, American opinion had come to the somewhat
+cynical belief that Italy would never get further than the verge of war;
+that her Austrian ally would be induced by the pressure of necessity to
+concede enough of those "national aspirations," of which we had heard
+much, to keep her southern neighbor at least lukewarmly neutral until
+the conclusion of the war. An American diplomat in Italy, with the best
+opportunity for close observation, said, as late as the middle of May:
+"I shall believe that Italy will go into the war only when I see it!"
+
+The process of squeezing her Austrian ally when the latter was in a
+tight place--as Italy's negotiating was interpreted commonly in
+America--naturally aroused little enthusiasm for the nation, and when
+suddenly, during the stormy weeks of mid-May, Italy made her decision
+and broke with Austria, Americans inferred, erroneously, that her
+"sordid" bargaining having met with a stubborn resistance from Vienna,
+there was nothing left for a government that had spent millions in war
+preparation but to declare war. The affair had that surface appearance,
+which was noisily proclaimed by Germany to the world. Chancellor
+Bethmann-Hollweg's sneer concerning the "voice of the piazza having
+prevailed" revealed not merely pique, but also a complete
+misunderstanding, a Teutonic misapprehension of the underlying motives
+that led to an inevitable step. No one who witnessed, as I did at close
+range, the swift unfolding of the drama which ended on May 23 in a
+declaration of war, can accept such a base or trivial reading of the
+matter. Like all things human the psychology of Italy's action was
+complex, woven in an intricate pattern, nevertheless at its base simple
+and inevitable, granted the fundamental racial postulates. Old impulses
+stirred in the Italians as well as new. Italy repeated according to the
+modern formula the ancient defiance by her Roman forefathers of the
+Teutonic danger. _"Fuori i barbari"_--out with the barbarians--has lain
+in the blood of Italy for two thousand years, to be roused to a fresh
+heat of hate by outraged Belgium, by invaded France, by the Lusitania
+murders. Less conscious, perhaps, but not less mighty as a moving force
+than this personal antagonism was the spiritual antagonism between the
+Latin and the German, between the two visions of the world which the
+German and the Latin imagine and seek to perpetuate. That in a large and
+very real sense this world agony of war is the supreme struggle between
+these two opposed traditions of civilization--a decision between two
+competing forms of life--seems to me so obvious as to need no argument.
+In such a struggle Italy must, by compulsion of historical tradition as
+well as of political situation, take her part on the side of those who
+from one angle or another are upholding with their lives the inheritance
+of Rome against the pretensions of force--law, justice, mercy, beauty
+against the dead weight of physical and material strength.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One had no more than put foot on the quay at Naples before the atmosphere
+of fateful hesitation in which Italy had lived for eight months became
+evident to the senses of the traveler. Naples was less strident, less
+vocal than ever before. That mob of hungry Neapolitans, which usually
+seizes violent hold of the stranger and his effects, was thin and
+spiritless. Naples was almost quiet. The Santa Lucia was deserted; the
+line of pretentious hotels with drawn shutters had the air of a summer
+resort out of season. The war had cut off Italy's greatest source of ready
+money--the idler. Naples was living to itself a subdued, zestless life.
+Cook's was an empty inutility. The sunny slopes of Sorrento, where during
+the last generation the German has established himself in all favorable
+sites, were thick with signs of sale.
+
+In other respects there were indications of prosperity--more building,
+cleaner streets, better shops. In the dozen years since I had been there,
+Italy had undoubtedly prospered, and even this beggar's paradise of sun
+and tourists had bettered itself after the modern way. I saw abundant
+signs of the new Italy of industrial expansion, which under German
+tutelage had begun to manufacture, to own ships, and to exploit itself.
+And there were also signs of war-time bloat--the immense cotton business.
+Naples as well as Genoa was stuffed with American cotton, the quays piled
+with the bales that could not be got into warehouses. It took a large
+credulity to believe that all this cotton was to satisfy Italian wants.
+Cotton, as everybody knew, was going across the Alps by the trainload.
+Nevertheless, our ship, which had a goodly amount of the stuff, was held
+at Gibraltar only a day until the English Government decided to accept
+the guarantees of consul and Italian Ambassador that it was legitimately
+destined for Italian factories--a straw indicating England's perplexity
+in the cotton business, especially with a nation that might any day become
+an ally! It would be wiser to let a little more cotton leak into Germany
+through Switzerland than to agitate the question of contraband at this
+delicate moment.
+
+The cotton brokers, the grain merchants, and a few others were making
+money out of Italy's neutrality, and _neutralista_ sentiment was
+naturally strong among these classes and their satellites. No doubt
+they did their best to give an impression of nationalism to the creed
+of their pockets. But a serious-minded merchant from Milan who dined
+opposite me on the way to Rome expressed the prevailing beliefs of his
+class as well as any one,--"War, yes, in time.... It must come.... But
+first we must be ready--we are not quite ready yet"; and he predicted
+almost to a day when Italy, finding herself ready, would enter the great
+conflict. He showed no enthusiasm either for or against war: his was a
+curiously fatalistic attitude of mind, an acceptance of the inevitable,
+which the American finds so hard to understand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And this was the prevailing note of Rome those early days of May--a
+dull, passive acceptance of the dreaded fate which had been threatening
+for so many months on the national horizon, ever since Austria plumped
+her brutal ultimatum upon little Serbia. There were no vivid debates,
+no pronounced current of opinion one way or the other, not much public
+interest in the prolonged discussions at the Consulta; just a lethargic
+iteration of the belief that sooner or later war must come with its
+terrible risks, its dubious victories. Given the Italian temperament
+and the nearness of the brink toward which the country was drifting,
+one looked for flashes of fire. But Rome, if more normal in its daily
+life than Naples in spite of the absence of those tourists who gather
+here at this season by the tens of thousands, was equally acquiescent
+and on the surface uninterested in the event.
+
+The explanation of this outward apathy in the public is simple: nobody
+knew anything definite enough as yet to rouse passions. The Italian
+newspaper is probably the emptiest receptacle of news published
+anywhere. The journals are all personal "organs," and anybody can know
+whose "views" they are voicing. There was the "Messagero," subsidized by
+the French and the English embassies, which emitted cheerful pro-Ally
+paragraphs of gossip. There was the "Vittorio," founded by the German
+party, patently the mouthpiece of Teutonic diplomacy. There was the
+"Giornale d'Italia" that spoke for the Vatican, and the "Idea Nazionale"
+which voiced radical young Italy. And so on down the list. But there was
+a perfectly applied censorship which suppressed all diplomatic leaks. So
+one read with perfect confidence that Prince von Bülow had driven to the
+Consulta at eleven-fifteen yesterday, and having been closeted with Baron
+Sonnino, the Italian Foreign Minister, or with the Premier, Signor
+Salandra, or with both, for forty-seven minutes, had emerged upon the
+street smiling. And shortly after this event Baron Macchio, the Austrian
+Envoy, arrived at the Consulta in his motor-car and had spent within the
+mystery of the Foreign Office twenty or more minutes. The reader might
+insert any fatal interpretation he liked between the lines of this
+chronicle. That was quite all the reality the Roman public, the people
+of Italy, had to speculate upon during weeks of waiting, and for the most
+part they waited quietly, patiently. For whatever the American prejudice
+against the dangers of secret diplomacy may be, the European, especially
+the Italian, idea is that all grave negotiations should be conducted
+privately--that the diplomatic cake should be composed by experts in
+retirement until it is ready for the baking. And the European public
+is well trained in controlling its curiosities.
+
+It was sufficiently astonishing to the American onlooker, however,
+accustomed to flaming extras and the plethoric discussion in public of the
+most intimate affairs, state and personal, to witness the acquiescence of
+emotional Italians in this complete obscurity about their fate and that of
+their children and their nation, which was being sorted behind the closed
+doors of the Consulta. Every one seemed to go about his personal business
+with an apparent calm, a shrug of expressive shoulders at the most,
+signifying belief in the sureness of war--soon. There was little animation
+in the cafés, practically none on the streets. Arragno's, usually buzzing
+with political prophecy, had a depressing, provincial calm. Unoccupied
+deputies sat in gloomy silence over their thin _consommations_. Even the
+1st of May passed without that demonstration by the Socialists against war
+so widely expected. To be sure, the Government had prudently packed Rome
+and the northern cities with troops: soldiers were lurking in every old
+courtyard, up all the narrow alleys, waiting for some hardy Socialist to
+"demonstrate." But it was not the plentiful troops, not even a lively
+thunderstorm that swept Rome all the afternoon, which discouraged the
+Socialists: they too were in doubt and apathy. They were hesitating,
+passing resolutions, defining themselves into fine segments of political
+opinion--and waiting for Somebody to act! They too awaited the completion
+of those endless discussions among the diplomats at the Consulta, at the
+Ballplatz in Vienna, and wherever diplomacy is made in Berlin. The first
+of May came and went, and the _carabinieri_, the secret police, the
+infantry, the cavalry with their fierce hairy helmets filed off to their
+barracks in a dripping dusk, dispirited, as if disappointed themselves
+that nothing definite, even violence, had yet come out of the business. So
+one caught a belated cab and scurried through the deserted streets to an
+empty hotel on the Pincian, more than half convinced that the Government
+meant really to do nothing except "negotiate" until the spirit of war had
+died from the hearts of the people.
+
+Yet much was going on beneath the surface. There were flashes to be
+seen in broad daylight. The King and his ministers at the eleventh hour
+decided not to attend the ceremonies at Quarto of the unveiling of the
+monument to the Garibaldian "Thousand." Now, what could that mean? Did
+it indicate that the King was not yet ready to choose his road and feared
+to compromise himself by appearing in company with the Francophile poet
+D'Annunzio, who was to give the address? It would be a hard matter to
+explain to Berlin, to whose nostrils the poet was anathema. Or did it
+mean literally that the negotiations with reluctant Austria had reached
+that acute point which might not permit the absence of authority from Rome
+even for twenty-four hours? The drifting, if it were drifting, was more
+rapid, day by day.
+
+There was a constant troop movement all over Italy, which could not be
+disguised from anybody who went to a railroad station. Italy was not
+"mobilizing," but that term in this year of war has come to have a
+diplomatic insignificance. Every one knew that a large army had already
+gone north toward the disputed frontier. More soldiers were going every
+day, and more men of the younger sort were silently disappearing from
+their ordinary occupations, as the way is in conscript countries. It was
+all being done admirably, swiftly, quietly--no placards. The _carabinieri_
+went from house to house and delivered verbal orders. But all this might
+be a mere "preparation," an argument that could not be used diplomatically
+at the Consulta, yet of vital force.
+
+There was the sudden twenty-four-hour visit of the Italian Ambassador
+at Paris to Rome. Why had he taken that long journey home for such a
+brief visit, consumed in conferences with the ministers? And Prince von
+Bülow had rallied to his assistance the Catholic Deputy Erzburger. Rome
+was seething with rumor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The remarkable passivity of the Italian public during these anxious
+moments was due in good part, no doubt, to its thorough confidence in
+the men who were directing the state, specifically in the Prime Minister
+Salandra and his Minister of Foreign Affairs Baron Sonnino, who were the
+Government. They were honest,--that everybody admitted,--and they were
+experienced. In less troubled times the nation might prefer the popular
+politician Giolitti, who had a large majority of the deputies in the
+Parliament in his party, and who had presented Italy a couple of years
+earlier with its newest plaything, Libya,--and concealed the bills. But
+Giolitti had prudently retired to his little Piedmont home in Cavour. All
+the winter he had kept out of Rome, leaving the Salandra Government to
+work out a solution of the knotty tangle in which he had helped to involve
+his country. Nobody knew precisely what Giolitti's views were, but it was
+generally accepted that he preserved the tradition of the Crispi
+statesmanship, which had made the abortion of the Triple Alliance. If he
+could not openly champion an active fulfillment of the alliance, at least
+he was avowedly _neutralista_, the best that Berlin and Vienna had come to
+hope from their southern ally. He was the great unknown factor politically,
+with his majority in the Chamber, his personal prestige. A clever American,
+long resident in Rome in sufficient intimacy with the political powers to
+make his words significant, told me,--"The country does not know what it
+wants. But Giolitti will tell them. When he comes we shall know whether
+there will be war!" That was May 9--a Sunday. Giolitti arrived in Rome
+the same week--and we knew, but not as the political prophet thought....
+
+Meanwhile, there were mutterings of the thunder to come out of this
+stagnant hesitation. One day I went out to the little town of Genzano
+in the Alban Hills, with an Italian mother who wished to see her son
+in garrison there. The regiment of Sardinian _Granatieri_, ordinarily
+stationed near the King in Rome, had been sent to this dirty little
+hill town to keep order. The populace were so threatening in their
+attitude that the soldiers were confined in their quarters to prevent
+street rows. We could see their heads at the windows of the old houses
+and convents where they were billeted, like schoolboys in durance vile.
+I read the word "_Socilismo_" scrawled in chalk over the walls and
+half-effaced by the hand of authority. The hard faces of the townsfolk
+scowled at us while we talked with a young captain. The Genzanans were
+against the war, the officer said, and stoned the soldiers. They did not
+want another African jaunt, with more taxes and fewer men to till the
+fields.
+
+Elsewhere one heard that the "populace" generally was opposed to war.
+"We shall have to shoot up some hundreds of the rats in Florence before
+the troops leave," the youthful son of a prefect told me. That in the
+North. As for the South, a shrug of the shoulders expressed the national
+doubt of Calabria, Sicily,--the weaker, less certain members of the
+family. Remembering the dire destruction of the earthquake in the Abruzzi,
+which wrought more ruin to more people than the Messina catastrophe, also
+the floods that had destroyed crops in the fertile river bottoms a few
+weeks before, one could understand popular opposition to more dangers and
+more taxes. These were some of the perplexities that beset the Government.
+No wonder that the diplomats were weighing their words cautiously at the
+Consulta, also weighing with extreme fineness the _quid pro quo_ they
+would accept as "compensation" from Austria for upsetting the Balkan
+situation. It was, indeed, a delicate matter to decide how many of those
+national aspirations might be sacrificed for the sake of present security
+without jeopardizing the nation's future. Italy needed the wisdom of
+patriots if ever in her history.
+
+The Salandra Government kept admirable order during these dangerous
+days, suppressing the slightest popular movement, pro or con. That was
+the wise way, until they knew themselves which road to take and had
+prepared the public mind. And they had plenty of troops to be occupied
+somehow. The exercise of the firm hand of authority against popular
+ebullitions is always a marvel to the American. To the European mind
+government means power, and power is exercised practically, concretely,
+not by writs of courts and sheriffs, but by armed troops. The Salandra
+Government had the power, and apparently did not mean to have its hand
+forced by the populace....
+
+The young officer at Genzano had no doubt that war was coming, nor
+had the handsome boy whom we at last ran to ground in an old Franciscan
+convent. He talked eagerly of the "promise" his regiment had received "to
+go first." His mother's face contracted with a spasm of pain as he spoke,
+but like a Latin mother she made no protest. If his country needed him,
+if war had to be.... On our way back to Rome across the Campagna we saw a
+huge silver fish swimming lazily in the misty blue sky--one of Italy's new
+dirigibles exercising. There were soldiers everywhere in their new gray
+linen clothes--tanned, boyish faces, many of them fine large fellows,
+scooped up from villages and towns all over Italy. The night was broken
+by the sound of marching feet, for troop movements were usually made at
+night. The soldiers were going north by the trainload. Each day one saw
+more of them in the streets, coming and going. Yet Baron Macchio and
+Prince von Bülow were as busy as ever at the Consulta on the Quirinal
+Hill, and rumor said that at last they were offering real "compensations."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The shops of Rome, as those of every city and town in Europe, were
+hung with war maps, of course. In Rome the prevailing map was that highly
+colored, imaginative rearrangement of southern Europe to fit the national
+aspirations. The new frontier ran along the summits of the Alps and took
+a wide swath down the Adriatic coast. It was a most flattering prospect
+and lured many loiterers to the shop windows. At the office of the
+"Giornale d'Italia" in the Corso there was displayed beside an irredentist
+map an approximate sketch of what Austria was willing to give, under
+German persuasion. The discrepancy between the two maps was obvious and
+vast. On the bulletin boards there were many news items emanating from the
+"unredeemed" in Trent and Trieste, chronicling riots and the severely
+repressive measures taken by the Austrian masters. The little piazza in
+front of the newspaper office was thronged from morning to night, and the
+old woman in the kiosk beside the door did a large business in maps.
+
+And yet this aspect of the Italian situation seems to me to have been
+much exaggerated. There was, so far as I could see, no great popular
+fervor over the disinherited Italians in Austrian lands, in spite of the
+hectic items about Austrian tyranny appearing daily in the newspapers--no
+great popular agony of mind over these "unredeemed." Also it was obvious
+that Italy in her new frontier proposed to include quite as many
+unredeemed Austrians and other folk as redeemed Italians! No; it was
+rather a high point of propaganda--as we should say commercially, a good
+talking proposition. Deeper, it represented the urge of nationalism,
+which is one of the extraordinary phenomena of this remarkable war. The
+American, vague in his feeling of nationalism, refuses to take quite
+seriously agitation for the "unredeemed." Why, he asks with naïveté, go
+to war for a few thousands of Italians in Trent and Trieste?
+
+I am not attempting to write history. I am guessing like another,
+seeking causes in a complex state of mind. We shall have to go back.
+Secret diplomacy may be the inveterate habit of Europe, especially of
+Italy. The new arrangement with the Allies has never been published,
+probably never will be. One suspects that it was made, essentially, before
+Italy had broken with Austria, before, perhaps, she had denounced her old
+alliance on the 5th of May at Vienna. And yet, although inveterately
+habituated to the mediaevalism of secret international arrangements, Italy
+is enough filled with the spirit of modern democracy to break any treaty
+that does not fulfill the will of the people. The Triple Alliance was
+really doomed at its conception, because it was a trade made by a few
+politicians and diplomats in secret and never known in its terms to the
+people who were bound by it. Any strain would break such a bond. The
+strain was always latent, but it became acute of late years, especially
+when Austria thwarted Italy's move on Turkey--as Salandra revealed later
+under the sting of Bethmann-Hollweg's taunts. It was badly strained,
+virtually broken, when Austria without warning to Italy stabbed at Serbia.
+Austria made a grave blunder there, in not observing the first term of the
+Triple Alliance, by which she was bound to take her allies into
+consultation. The insolence of the Austrian attitude was betrayed in the
+disregard of this obligation: Italy evidently was too unimportant a factor
+to be precise with. Italy might, then and there, the 1st of August, 1914,
+very well have denounced the Alliance, and perhaps would have done so had
+she been prepared for the consequences, had the Salandra Government been
+then at the helm.
+
+There is another coil to the affair, not generally recognized in America.
+Austria in striking at Serbia was potentially aiming at a closer
+envelopment of Italy along the Adriatic, provision for which had been made
+in a special article of the Triple Alliance,--the seventh,--under which
+she had bound herself to grant compensations to Italy for any disturbance
+of the Balkan situation. Austria, when she was brought to recognize this
+commission of fault,--which was not until December, 1914, not seriously
+until the close of January, 1915,--pretended that her blow at Serbia was
+chastisement, not occupation. But it is absurd to assume that having
+chastised the little Balkan state she would leave it free and independent.
+It is true that in January Austrian troops were no longer in Balkan
+territory, but that was not due to intention or desire! They had been
+there, they are there now, and they will be there as long as the Teutonic
+arms prevail. It is a game of chess: Italy knew the gambit as soon as
+Austria moved against Serbia. The response she must have known also, but
+she had not the power to move then. So she insisted pertinaciously on her
+right under the seventh clause of the Triple Alliance to open negotiations
+for "compensations" for Austria's aggression in the Balkans, and finally
+with the assistance of Berlin compelled the reluctant Emperor to admit her
+right.
+
+These complexities of international chess, which the American mind
+never seems able to grasp, are instinctively known by the man in the
+street in Europe. Every one has learned the gambits: they do not have
+to be explained, nor their importance demonstrated. The American can
+profitably study those maps so liberally displayed in shop windows,
+as I studied them for hours in default of anything better to do in
+the drifting days of early May. The maps will show at a glance that
+Italy's northern frontiers are so ingeniously drawn--by her hereditary
+enemy--that her head is virtually in chancery, as every Italian knows
+and as the whole world has now realized after four months of patient
+picking by Italian troops at the outer set of Austrian locks. And there
+is the Adriatic. When Austria made the frontier, the sea-power question
+was not as important as it has since become. The east coast of the
+Adriatic was a wild hinterland that might be left to the rude peoples
+of Montenegro and Albania. But it has come into the world since then.
+Add to this that the Italian shore of the Adriatic is notably without
+good harbors and indefensible, and one has all the elements of the
+strategic situation. All fears would be superfluous if Austria, the old
+bully at the north, would keep quiet: the Triple Alliance served well
+enough for over thirty years. But would Austria play fair with an
+unsympathetic ally that she had not taken into her confidence when
+she determined to violate the first term of the Triple Alliance?
+
+All this may now be pondered in the "Green Book," more briefly and
+cogently in the admirable statement which Italy made to the Powers when
+she declared war on Austria. That the Italian Government was not only
+within its treaty rights in demanding those "compensations" from Austria,
+but would have been craven to pass the incident of the attack on Serbia
+without notice, seems to me clear. That it was a real necessity, not a
+mere trading question, for Italy to secure a stronger frontier and control
+of the Adriatic, seems to me equally obvious. These, I take it, were the
+vital considerations, not the situation of the "unredeemed" Italians in
+Trent and Trieste. But Austria, in that grudging maximum of concession
+which she finally offered to Italy's minimum of demand, insisted upon
+taking the sentimental or knavish view of the Italian attitude: she would
+yield the more Italianated parts of the territory in dispute, not the
+vitally strategic places. Nor would she deliver her concessions until
+after the conclusion of the war--if ever!--after she had got what use
+there was from the Italians enrolled in her armies fighting Russia. For
+Vienna to regard the tender principle of nationalism is a good enough
+joke, as we say. Her persistence in considering Italy's demands as either
+greed or sentiment is proof of Teutonic lack of imagination. The Italians
+are sentimental, but they are even more practical. It was not the woes of
+the "unredeemed" that led the Salandra Government to reject the final
+offering of Austria, and to accept the risks of war instead. It was rather
+the very practical consideration of that indefensible frontier, which
+Austria stubbornly refused to make safe for Italy--after she had given
+cause, by her attack upon Serbia, to render all her neighbors uneasy in
+their minds for their safety.
+
+So much for the sentimental and the strategical threads in the Consulta
+negotiations. It was neither for sentiment nor for strategical advantage
+solely that Italy finally entered the war. Nevertheless, if the German
+Powers had frankly and freely from the start recognized Italy's position,
+and surrendered to her _immediate_ possession--as they were ready to do
+at the last moment--sufficient of those national aspirations to safeguard
+national security, with hands off in the Adriatic, Italy most probably
+would have preferred to remain neutral. I cannot believe that Salandra
+or the King really wanted war. They were sincerely struggling to keep
+their nation out of the European melting-pot as long as they could. But
+they were both shrewd and patriotic enough not to content themselves with
+present security at the price of ultimate danger. And if they had been as
+weak as the King of Greece, as subservient as the King of Bulgaria, they
+would have had to reckon with a very different people from the Bulgars and
+the Greeks--a nation that might quite conceivably have turned Italy into a
+republic and ranged her beside her Latin sister on the north in the world
+struggle. The path of peace was in no way the path of prudence for the
+House of Savoy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Lack of imagination is surely one of the prominent characteristics of
+the modern German, at least in statecraft. Imagination applied to the
+practical matters of daily living is nothing more than the ability to
+project one's own personality beneath the skin of another, to look
+around at the world through that other person's eyes and to realize
+what values the world holds for him. The Prince von Bülow, able diplomat
+though they call him, could not look upon the world through Italian
+eyes in spite of his Italian wife, his long residence in Rome, his
+professed love for Italy. It must have been with his consent if not
+by his suggestion that Erzburger, the leader of the Catholic party in
+the Reichstag, was sent to Rome at this critical juncture. The German
+mind probably said,--"Here is a notable Catholic, political leader of
+German Catholics, and so he must be especially agreeable to Italians,
+who, as all the world knows, are Catholics." The reasoning of a stupid
+child! Outwardly Italy is Catholic, but modern Italy has shown herself
+very restive at any papal meddling in national affairs. To have an
+alien--one of the "_barbari_"--seat himself at the Vatican and try to
+use the papal power in determining the policy of the nation in a matter
+of such magnitude, was a fatal blunder of tactless diplomacy. Nor could
+Herr Erzburger's presence at the Vatican these tense days be kept secret
+from the curious journalists, who lived on such meager items of news. No
+more tactful was it for Prince von Bülow to meet the Italian politician
+Giolitti at the Palace Hotel on the Pincian. There is no harm in one
+gentleman's meeting another in the rooms of a public hotel so respectable
+as the Palace, but when the two are playing the international chess
+game and one is regarded as an enemy and the other as a possible traitor,
+the popular mind is likely to take a heated and prejudiced view of the
+small incident. Less obvious to the public, but none the less untactful,
+was the manner in which the German Ambassador tried to use his social
+connection in Rome, his family relationships in the aristocracy of Italy,
+to influence the King and his ministers. He might have taken warning from
+the royal speech attributed to the Queen Mother in reply to the Kaiser:
+"The House of Savoy rules one at a time." He should have kept away from
+the back stairs. He should have known Italy well enough to realize that
+the elements of Roman society with which he was affiliated do not
+represent either power or public opinion in Italy any more than good
+society does in most modern states. Roman aristocracy, like all
+aristocracies, whether of blood or of money, is international in its
+sympathies, skeptic in its soul. And its influence, in a decisive question
+of life and death to the nation, is nil. The Prince von Bülow was wasting
+his time with people who could not decide anything. As Salandra said, with
+dignified restraint in answer to the vulgar attack upon him made by the
+German Chancellor,--"The Prince was a sincere lover of Italy, but he was
+ill-advised by persons who no longer had any weight in the nation"--as
+his colleague in London seems to have been ill-advised when he assured
+his master that Englishmen would not fight under any circumstances! The
+trouble with diplomacy would seem to be that its ranks are still recruited
+from "the upper classes," whose gifts are social and whose sympathies
+reflect the views and the prejudices of a very small element in the
+state. Good society in Rome was still out on the Pincian for the afternoon
+promenade, was still exchanging calls and dinners these golden spring
+days, but its views and sympathies could not count in the enormous complex
+of beliefs and emotions that make the mind of a nation in a crisis. Prince
+von Bülow's motor was busily running about the narrow streets of old Rome,
+the gates of the pretty Villa Malta were hospitably open,--guarded by
+_carabinieri_,--but if the German Ambassador had put on an old coat and
+strolled through the Trastevere, or had sat at a little marble-topped
+table in some obscure café, or had traveled second or third class between
+Rome and Naples, he might have heard things that would have brought the
+negotiations at the Consulta to an abrupter close one way or the other.
+For Italy was making up its mind against his master.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Rome was very still these hesitant days of early May, Rome was very
+beautiful--I have never known her so beautiful! The Pincian, in spite
+of its afternoon parade, had the sad air of forced retirement of some
+well-to-do family. The Piazza di Spagna basked in its wonted flood
+of sunshine with a curious Sabbatical calm. A stray _forestieri_ might
+occasionally cross its blazing pavements and dive into Piale's or Cook's,
+and a few flower girls brought their irises and big white roses to the
+steps, more from habit than for profit surely. The Forum was like a wild,
+empty garden, and the Palatine, a melancholy waste of fragments of the
+past where an old Garibaldian guard slunk after the stranger, out of
+lonesomeness, babbling strangely of that other war in which he had part
+and mixing his memories with the tags of history he had been taught to
+recite anent the Roman monuments. As I wandered there in the drowse of
+bees among the spring blossoms and looked out upon the silent field that
+once was the heart of Rome, it was hard to realize that again on this
+richly human soil of Italy the fate of its people was to be tested in
+the agony of a merciless war, that even now the die was being cast less
+than a mile away across the roofs. The soil of Rome is the most deeply
+laden in the world with human memories, which somehow exhale a subtle
+fragrance that even the most casual stranger cannot escape, that condition
+the children of the soil. The roots of the modern Italian run far down
+into the mould of ancient things: his distant ancestors have done much
+of his political thinking for him, have established in his soul the
+conditions of his present dilemma.... I wonder if Prince von Bülow ever
+spent a meditative hour looking down on the fragments of the Forum from
+the ilex of the Palatine, over the steep ascent of the Capitoline that
+leads to the Campidolgio, as far as the grandiose marble pile that fronts
+the newer city? Probably not.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Germany wanted her place in the sun. She had always wanted it from the
+day, two thousand years and more ago, when the first Teuton tribes came
+over the Alpine barrier and spread through the sun-kissed fields of
+northern Italy. The Italian knows that in his blood. There are two ways
+in which to deal with this German lust of another's lands--to kill the
+invader or to absorb him. Italy has tried both. It takes a long time to
+absorb a race,--hundreds of years,--and precious sacrifices must be made
+in the process. No wonder that Italy does not wish to become Germany's
+place in the sun! Nor to swallow the modern German.
+
+When the Teuton first crossed the Alpine barrier and poured himself
+lustfully out over the fertile plains of northern Italy, it was literally
+a place in the sun which he coveted. In the ages since then his lust has
+changed its form: now it is economic privilege that he seeks for his
+people. In order to maintain that level of industrial superiority, of
+material prosperity, to which he has raised himself, he must "expand"
+in trade and influence. He must have more markets to exploit and always
+more. It is the same lust with a new name. "Thou shalt not covet" surely
+was written for nations as well as for individuals. But our modern
+economic theory, the modern Teutonic state, is based on the belief: "Thou
+shalt covet, and the race that covets most and by power gets most, that
+race shall survive!" And here is the central knot of the whole dark
+tangle.  The German coveting greater economic opportunities, knowing
+himself strong to survive, believes in his divine right to possess. It
+is conscious Darwinism--the survival of the fittest, materially, which
+he is applying to the world--Darwinism accelerated by an intelligent will.
+And the non-Germanic world--the Latin world, for it _is_ a Latin world in
+varying degrees of saturation outside of Germany--rejects the theory and
+the practice with loathing--when it sees what it means.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What makes for the happiness of a nation? I asked myself in the mellow
+silence of ancient Rome. Is it true that economic conquest makes for
+strength, happiness, survival for the nation or for the individual?
+
+This Italy has always been poor, at least within modern memory--a literal,
+actual poverty when often there has not been enough to eat in the family
+pot to go around. She has had a difficult time in the economic race for
+bread and butter for her children. There is neither sufficient land easily
+cultivable nor manufacturing resources to make her rich, to support her
+growing population according to the modern standards of comfort. The
+Germans despise the Italians for their little having.
+
+Yet the Italian peasant--man, woman, or child--is a strong human being,
+inured to meager living and hardship, loving the soil from which he digs
+his living with an intense, fiery love. And poverty has not killed the
+joy of living in the Italian. Far from it! In spite of the exceedingly
+laborious lives which the majority lead, the privations in food, clothing,
+housing, the narrowness,--in the modern view,--of their lives, no one
+could consider the Italian people unhappy. Their characters, like their
+hillside farms, are the result of an intensive cultivation--of making
+the most out of very little naturally given.
+
+A healthy, high-tempered, vital people these, not to be despised in the
+_kaiserliche_ fashion even as soldiers. Surely not as human beings, as a
+human society. And their poverty has had much influence in making the
+Italians the sturdy people they are to-day. Poverty has some depressing
+aspects, but in the main her very lack of economic opportunity--the want
+of coal and factories and other sources of wealth--has kept most of these
+people close to the soil, where one feels the majority of any healthy,
+enduring race should be. Poverty has made the Italians hard, content with
+little, and able to wring the most out of that little. It has cultivated
+them intensively as a people, just as they have been forced to cultivate
+their rock-bound fields foot by foot.
+
+There are qualities in human living more precious than prosperity, and
+in these Italians have shared abundantly--beauty, sentiment, tradition,
+all that give color and meaning to life. These are the treasures of Latin
+civilization in behalf of which the allied nations of Europe are now
+fighting....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I am well enough aware that all this is contrary to the premises of the
+economic and social polity that controls modern statecraft. I know that
+our great nations, notably Germany, are based on exactly the opposite
+premise--that the strength of a state depends on the economic
+development of its people, on its wealth-producing power. Germany has
+been the most convinced, the most conscious, the most relentless exponent
+of the pernicious belief that the ultimate welfare of the state depends
+primarily on the wealth-getting power of its citizens. She has exalted
+an economic theory into a religion of nationality with mystical appeals.
+She has taught her children to go singing into the jaws of death in order
+that the Fatherland may extend her markets and thus enrich her citizens
+at the expense of the citizens of other states, who are her inferiors in
+the science of slaughter. A queer religion, and all the more abhorrent
+when dressed out with the phrases of Christianity!
+
+All modern states are more or less tainted with the same
+delusion--ourselves most, perhaps, after Germany. "We have all sinned,"
+as an eminent Frenchman said, "your people and mine, as well as England
+and Germany." It is time to revise some of the fundamental assumptions
+of political philosophers and statesmen. Let us admit that peoples may
+be strong and happy and contented without seeking to control increasingly
+those sources of wealth still left undeveloped on the earth's surface,
+without cutting one another's throats in an effort for national expansion.
+The psychology of states cannot be fundamentally different from that of
+the individuals in them. And the happiness of the individual has never
+been found to consist wholly, even largely, in his economic prosperity.
+
+Because the Latin soul divines this axiomatic belief, because the
+Latin world admits a larger, finer interpretation of life than
+economic success, all civilization waits upon the great decision of
+this war.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Suddenly in the calm of these drifting, hesitant days, when nobody
+knew what the nation desired, there came a bolt of lightning. I have
+said that the German people lack imagination by which to understand
+the world outside themselves. They do not coördinate their activities.
+Otherwise, why commit the barbarism of sinking the Lusitania, just at
+the moment when they were straining to keep Italy from breaking
+completely the frayed bonds of the Triple Alliance? Probably it never
+entered any German head in the "high commandment" that the prosecution
+of his undersea warfare might have a very real connection with the
+Italian situation. He could not credit any nation with such "soft
+sentimentality," as he calls it. Yet I am not alone in ascribing a
+large significance to the sinking of the Lusitania in Italy's decision
+to make war. Every observer of these events whom I have talked with or
+whose report I have read gives the same testimony, that Italy first
+woke to her own mind at the shock of the Lusitania murders....
+
+The news came to me in my peaceful room above the Barberini Gardens.
+The fountain was softly dripping below, the spring air was full of the
+song of birds as another perfect day opened. The warm sunshine reached
+lovingly up the yellowed walls of the old palace opposite. All the
+little, old, familiar things of a long past, which pull so strongly
+here in Rome at the human heart, were moving in the new day. The life
+of men, so troubled, so sad, seemed beautiful this May morning, with
+the suave beauty of ideals that for centuries have coursed through the
+blood of Italy.... Luigi, the black-haired, black-eyed lad who brought
+the morning coffee and newspapers, was telling me of the horrid crime.
+With his outstretched fist clenched and shaking with rage he said the
+words, then, dropping the paper with its heavy headlines, cursed it as
+if it too symbolically represented the hideous thing that Germany had
+become. "Now," he cried, "there'll be war! We shall fight them, the
+swine!" A few days afterward Luigi departed to fight the "swine" on
+some Alpine pass.
+
+Luigi's reaction to the sinking of the Lusitania was typical of all
+Rome, all Italy. The same burst of execration and horror was in every
+mouth. "Fuori i Barbari" was the title of a little anti-German sheet
+that was appearing in Rome: it got a new significance as it hung in
+the kiosks or was scanned by scowling men. It became the muttered cry
+of the street. I am not simple enough to believe that the sinking of
+the Lusitania of itself "drove Italy into the war." Nations no more
+than individuals, alas, are idealistic enough to sacrifice themselves
+simply for their moral resentments. But this fresh example of cynical
+indifference to the opinion of civilization, just at the critical point
+of decision for the Italian people, had much to do with the rousing of
+that war fury without which no government can push a nation into war.
+First there must be the spirit of hate, a personal emotion in the hearts
+of many. It must be remembered also that Italy had felt with the entire
+civilized world the outrage of Belgium. It has even been rumored that
+one of the hard passages between Italy and her German allies was the
+condition that Germany wished to attach to any Austrian concessions,
+by which Italy at the peace conference should uphold Germany's "claims"
+to Belgium. No one knows the truth about this, but if true it is in
+itself an adequate explanation of the failure of the negotiations. And
+now the Lusitania came with a fresh shock as an iterated example of
+German state policy. It proclaimed glaringly to the eyes of all men
+what the Teutonic thing is, what it means to the world. The Latin has
+been cruel and bloody in his deeds, like all men, but he has never made
+a cult of inhumanity, never justified it as a principle of statecraft.
+Italians, prone to hate as to love, prone especially to hate the Teuton,
+those aliens who have lusted after their richness and beauty all these
+centuries, felt the Lusitania murders to the depths of their souls. It
+was like a red writing on the wall, serving notice that in due season
+Germany and Austria would tear Italy limb from limb because of her
+"treachery" in not abetting them in their attack upon the peace of
+the world.
+
+Prince von Bülow and Baron Macchio might as well have discontinued
+their daily visits to the Consulta after the 7th of May. Whatever
+they might have hoped to accomplish with their diplomacy to keep Italy
+neutral had been irretrievably ruined by the diplomacy of Grand Admiral
+von Tirpitz. The smallest match, the scratch of a boot-heel on stone,
+can set off a powder magazine. The Lusitania was a goodly sized match.
+If the King and his ministers were waiting for the country to declare
+itself, if they wanted the excuse of national emotion before taking
+the final irrevocable steps into war, they had their desire. From the
+hour when the news of the sinking of the Lusitania came over the wires,
+Italy began to mutter and shout. The months of hesitation were ended.
+There were elements enough of hate, and Germany had given them all
+focus. "Fuori i Barbari!" I bought a sheet from the old woman who
+went hurrying up the street shouting hoarsely,--"Fuori i Barbari!" ...
+"Fuori i Barbari!" ... "Barbari!"....
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+_The Politician Speaks_
+
+Giovanni Giolitti came to Rome, a few days after the Lusitania affair.
+Ostensibly he had come to town from his home in little Cavour, where he
+had been in retirement all the winter, to visit a sick wife at Frascati.
+Montecitorio, home of politicians, began to hum. Rome quivering with the
+emotions of its great decision muttered. What did Giolitti's presence at
+this eleventh hour signify? Remember what the shrewd American observer
+had said the week before,--"Giolitti will tell the Italians what they
+want."
+
+The master politician, the ex-Premier, the heir to Crispian policies,
+was received at the railroad station by a few faithful friends, much
+as Boss Barnes or Boss Penrose, returning from a voluntary exile in
+New York or Pennsylvania, might be received by a few of the "boys."
+They were Deputies from Montecitorio frock-coated and silk-hatted,
+like politicians all the world over, not a popular throng of a hundred
+thousand Romans singing and shouting, such as a few days later was to
+gather in the piazza before the same station to greet the poet,
+D'Annunzio. It is well to understand the significance of this
+unobtrusive coming of the political leader at the moment, to realize
+what sinister meaning it had for the existing Government, for the
+Italian nation, for the Allies--for the world.
+
+The Italian Deputies who had been elected two years before, long before
+even the astutest politician had any suspicion of the black cloud that
+was to rise over Europe, were Giolittian by a great majority. Giolitti
+was then the chief figure in Italian politics and controlled the Chamber
+of Deputies. The Giolitti "machine," as we should say, was the only
+machine worth mention in Italy. Rumor says that it was buttressed with
+patronage as American machines are, and, more specifically, that Giolitti
+when in power had diverted funds which should have gone into national
+defense to political ends, also had deferred the bills of the Libyan
+expedition so that at the outbreak of the war Italy found herself badly
+in debt and with an army in need of everything. Soldiers drilled in the
+autumn of 1914 in patent leathers or barefooted and dressed as they could,
+while the Giolittian clubs and interests flourished. Also it was said
+that the prefects of the provinces, who in the Italian system have large
+powers, especially in influencing elections, were henchmen of the
+politician. I do not know how just these accusations may be, nor how
+true the more serious accusation shortly to be hurled abroad that
+Giolitti had sold himself for German gold. The latter is easy to say
+and hard to prove; the former is hard to prove and easy to believe--it
+being the way of politicians the world over.
+
+However dull or bright Giolitti's personal honor may have been,
+the Parliamentary situation was difficult in the extreme--one of
+those absurd paradoxes of representative government liable to happen
+any time. Here were five hundred-odd elected representatives of the
+people owing allegiance, really, not to the King, not to the nation,
+not to the responsible ministers in charge of the state, but to the
+politician Giolitti. If they had been elected under the stress of
+the war, after the 1st of August, 1914, they might not have been the
+same personal representatives of Giovanni Giolitti. We cannot say.
+Democracies are prone to be deceived in their chosen representatives:
+they discover them mortgaged to a leader, secret or open. The Salandra
+Government knew, of course, Giolitti's prejudices in favor of Italy's
+old allies, disguised as patriotically _neutralista_ sympathies. He
+had discreetly retired to little Cavour in Piedmont all the winter,
+maintaining a disinterested aloofness throughout the prolonged
+negotiations. Yet he knew, the Salandra Government and the King knew,
+the people knew, that Giovanni Giolitti must be reckoned with before
+Parliament could be opened to ratify the acts of the ministers, to
+support them in whatever measures they had prepared to take. It would
+be simple political insanity to open the Chamber before Giolitti had
+been dealt with, leading to acrid discussions, scandal, the inevitable
+downfall of the ministry, and political chaos. The nation must be united
+and express itself unitedly by its legal mouthpieces before the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It has been said, I do not know with what truth, that Prince von Bülow had
+informed the ex-Premier of Austria's ultimate concessions even before they
+were presented to Salandra and Sonnino, and consequently that Giolitti was
+precisely aware of the situation when he reached Rome. It is easy to
+believe almost anything of a diplomacy that dealt with Giolitti in the
+private rooms of a hotel after the downfall of the Salandra Government....
+At any rate, Giolitti went through the forms correctly: he called on the
+Premier Salandra, the Foreign Minister Sonnino, who laid before the
+ex-Premier the situation as it had shaped itself. Even the King received
+him in private audience. So much was due to the leading politician of
+Italy, who controlled, supposedly, a majority of the existing Parliament.
+In a sense he held the Salandra Government in his hand, after the opening
+of the Chamber, which could not be long delayed.
+
+Then the politician spoke. Rather, to be precise, he wrote a little note
+to a faithful intimate, which was meant for the newspapers and got into
+them at once. It was a very innocent little note of a few lines in which
+he confided to "Caro Carlo" his opinion on the tense national situation:
+better stay with the old allies--the Austrian offers seemed sufficiently
+satisfactory. This may well have been a sincere, a patriotic judgment, as
+sincere and patriotic as Bryan's resignation from the American Cabinet a
+few weeks later. But Italians did not think so. Almost universally they
+gave it other, sinister interpretations. Giolitti had been "bought," was
+nothing more than the knavish mouthpiece of German intrigue. Giolitti
+became overnight _traditore_, the arch-conspirator, the enemy of his
+country! It must have staggered the politician, this sudden fury which
+his innocent advice had roused. And, to condemn him, it is not necessary
+to believe him to have been a knave bought by German gold.
+
+It is important to realize what happened overnight. Giolitti had
+become the most hated, most denounced man in all Italy, and in so far
+as he represented honest _neutralista_ sentiment the cause was dead.
+If that was what the Salandra Government wanted to achieve, they had
+got their desire. If, as the politicians say, they were "feeling out"
+popular sentiment, they need no longer doubt what it was. Columns of
+vituperation appeared in the anti-German newspapers, crowds began to
+form and shout in the streets. "_Traditore_," hissed with every accent
+of hate and scorn, filled the air. Giolitti's life was seriously in
+danger--or the Government preferred to think so. The great apartment
+house on the Via Cavour in which he lived was cordoned off by double
+lines of troops. Cavalry kept guard, all day and half the night, before
+the steps of Santa Maria Maggiore, ready to sweep through the crowded
+streets in case the mob got out of hand. Other troops poured out of the
+barracks over the city, doing _piquet a mato_ on all the main streets
+and squares of the city.
+
+Giolitti had, indeed, swayed events,--"told the people what they
+wanted,"--but not in the expected manner. He had revealed the nation
+to itself, drifting on the verge of war, and they knew now that they
+wanted nothing of Giolitti or neutrality or German compromises. They
+wanted war with Austria. The remarkable fact is that a nation which had
+submitted in passivity to absolute ignorance of the diplomatic exchanges,
+waiting dumbly the decision that should determine its fate,--of which it
+could be said that a large number, perhaps a majority, were neutral at
+heart,--suddenly overnight awoke to a realization of the political
+situation and rejected the prudent advice of their popular politician,
+denounced him, and inferentially proclaimed themselves for war. At last
+they had seen: they saw that the Salandra Government in which they had
+confidence had come to the parting of the ways with Austria, and they
+saw the hand of Giolitti trying to play the game of their ancient enemy.
+
+Then the Salandra Government did a bold, a dramatic thing: it resigned
+in a body, leaving the King free to choose ministers who could obtain
+the support of the Giolitti following in Parliament. It was inevitable,
+it was simple, it was sincere, and it was masterly politics. The public
+was aghast. At the eleventh hour the state was left thus leaderless
+because its real desires were to be thwarted by a politician who took
+his orders from the German Embassy.
+
+Thereupon the "demonstrations" against Giolitti, against Austria and
+Germany, began in earnest.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first popular "demonstration" which I saw in Rome was a harmless
+enough affair, and for that matter none of them were really serious.
+The Government always had the situation firmly in hand, with many
+regiments of infantry, also cavalry, to reinforce the police, the secret
+service, and the _carabinieri_, who alone might very well have handled
+all the disorder that occurred. Never, I suspect, was there any more
+demonstrating than the Government thought wise. The first occasion was
+a little crowd of boys and youths,--not precisely riff-raff, rather like
+our own college boys,--and they did less mischief than a few hundred
+freshmen or sophomores would have done. They marched down the street from
+the Piazza Tritone, shouting and carrying a couple of banners inscribed
+with "Abasso Giolitti." They stoned a few signs, notably the one over the
+empty office of the Austrian-Lloyd company, then, being turned from the
+Corso and the Austrian Embassy by the police, they rushed back up the
+hill to the Salandra residence, to hang about and yell themselves hoarse
+in the hope of evoking something from the former Premier. The two poles
+of the following "demonstrations" were the Salandra and the Giolitti
+residences with occasional futile dashes into the Corso....
+
+For the better part of a week these street excitements kept up, not
+merely in Rome, but all over Italy: for that one week, while the King
+sent for various public men and offered them the task of forming a
+new ministry, which in every case was respectfully declined--as was
+expected.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Why did the King not send for Giovanni Giolitti, the one statesman
+who under ordinary circumstances might have expected a summons?
+Neither Giolitti nor any of his intimates was invited to form a cabinet
+and reëstablish constitutional government. Nothing would appear to be
+more natural than that the leader of the Opposition, controlling a
+majority of the Deputies, who avowedly represented a policy opposed
+to that of the ministers who had resigned, should be asked himself to
+take charge. But Giolitti was never asked, and daily the shouting in
+the streets grew louder, more menacing, and the mood of the public more
+tense. Nothing was plainer than that if Giolitti had a majority of the
+Deputies, the people were not for him and his policies. The House of
+Savoy, as the King so well put it, rules by expressing the will of the
+people. Each day it was more evident what that will was. Giolitti, the
+master politician, was being outplayed by mere honest men. They had used
+him--as Germany had used him--to try out the temper of the nation. With
+him they drew the _neutralista_ and pro-German fire beforehand, prudently,
+not to be defeated by hostile party criticism in the Chamber. And when
+they got through with the politician, they threw him out: literally they
+intimated through the Minister of Public Safety that they would not be
+responsible any longer for his personal safety. There was nothing for
+him but to go--before Parliament had assembled!
+
+As Italy seethed and boiled, threatening to break into revolutionary
+violence, while the King received one respectable nonentity after
+another, who each time after a very brief consideration declined the
+proffered responsibility, Giolitti must have thought that the life of
+the politician is not an easy one. He was stoned when he appeared on
+the streets in his motor. He had to sneak out of the city at dawn that
+last day. Where was all the _neutralista_ sentiment so evident the first
+months of the war? And where was the German influence supposed to be so
+strong in the upper commercial classes? Germans as well as Austrians
+were scurrying out of Italy as fast as they could. Their insinuating
+multiplicity was proved by the numbers of shuttered shops. More hotels
+along the Pincian, whose "Swiss" managers found it prudent to retire
+over the Alps, were closed. Angry crowds swarmed about the Austrian
+and German consulates, also the embassies when they could get through
+the cordons of troops on the Piazza Colonna. Noisy Rome these days might
+very well give rise to pessimistic reflections on the folly of popular
+government to politicians like Giolitti and the Prince von Bülow, whose
+obviously prudent policies were thus being upset by the "voice of the
+piazza" led by a very literary poet! No doubt at this moment they would
+point to Ferdinand of Bulgaria and the King of Greece as enlightened
+monarchs who know how to secure their own safety by ignoring the will
+of their peoples. But the end for Ferdinand and Constantine is not yet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The trouble with the politician as with the trained diplomat is that
+he never goes beneath the surface. He takes appearances for realities.
+He has often lost that instinct of race which should enable him to
+understand his own humanity. To a Giolitti, adept in the trading game
+of political management, it must seem insane for Italy to plunge into
+the war against powerful allies, who at just this time were triumphing
+in West and East alike--all the more when the sentimental and trading
+instincts of the populace might be partly satisfied with the concessions
+so grudgingly wrung from Austria. It was not only rash: it was bad
+politics!
+
+But what Giolitti and men of his stripe the world over cannot
+understand is that the people are never as crafty and wise and mean as
+their politicians. The people are still capable of honest emotions, of
+heroic desires, of immense sacrifices. They love and hate and loathe
+with simple hearts. The politician like the popular novelist makes the
+fatal mistake of underrating his audience. And his audience will leave
+him in the lurch at the crisis, as Italy left Giolitti. Italy was never
+enthusiastic, as its enemies have charged, for a war of mere aggression,
+for realizing the "aspirations" because Austria was in a tight place,
+even for redeeming a million and a half more or less of expatriated
+Italians in Austrian territory. Politicians and statesmen talked of
+these matters, perforce; the people repeated them. For they were tangible
+"causes." But what Italians hated was Austrian and German leadership--were
+the "_barbari_" themselves, their ancient foe; and when told that they
+had better continue to make their bed with the "_barbari_," they revolted.
+
+There are many men in every nation,--some of the politician type, some
+of the aristocratic type, some of the business type,--who by interest
+and temperament are timid and fundamentally cynical. They are pacifists
+for profit. About them gather the uncourageous "intellectuals," who
+believe in the potency of all established and dominating power whatever
+it may be. But these "leading citizens" fortunately are a minority in
+any democracy. They do most of the negotiating, much of the talking, but
+when the crisis comes,--and the issue is out in the open for every one
+to see,--they have to reckon with the instinctive majority, whose
+emotional nature has not been dwarfed. That majority is not necessarily
+the "rabble," the irresponsible and ignorant mob of the piazza as the
+German Chancellor sees them: it is the great human army of "little
+people," normal, simple, for the most part honest, whose selfish stake
+in the community is not large enough to stifle their deepest instincts.
+In them, I believe, lies the real idealism of any nation, also its plain
+virtues and its abiding strength.
+
+The Italian situation was a difficult one, obviously. Public opinion
+had been perplexed. There were the classes I have just mentioned, by
+interest and temperament either pro-German or honestly neutral. There
+was the radical mob that the year before had temporarily turned Italy
+into republics. There was the unreliable South. And the hard-ground
+peasants who feared, justly, heavier taxes and the further hardships
+of war. And there were the millions of honest but undecided Italians
+who hated Teutonism and all its deeds, who were intelligent enough to
+realize the exposed situation of Italy, who felt the call of blood for
+the "unredeemed," and the vaguer but none the less powerful call of
+civilization from their northern kin--above all who responded to the
+fervid historical idealism of the poet voicing the longing of their
+souls to become once more the mighty nation they had been. These were
+the people whose change of hearts and minds surprised Giolitti and the
+Germans.
+
+What had been going on in those hearts of the plain people all these
+months of the great war, Giolitti could not understand. It was another
+Italy from the one he had charmed that rose at his prudent advice and
+threw the bitter word "_traditore_" in his teeth and howled him out of
+Rome. Traitor, yes! traitor to the loftier, bolder, finer longings of
+their hearts to take their stand at all cost with their natural allies
+in this last titanic struggle with the barbarians. It was this sort of
+public that spoke in the piazza and whose voice prevailed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The diplomat deals too exclusively with conventional persons, with the
+sophisticated. The politician deals too exclusively with the successful,
+with the commercial and exploiting classes. Giolitti's associations
+were of this class. Like any other _bourgeoisie_ of finance and trade,
+"big business" in Italy was on the side of the big German battalions,
+who at this juncture were winning victories. Italy was peculiarly under
+the influence of German and Austrian finance. One of its leading lending
+banks--the Banca Commerciale--was a German concern. Most of its newer
+developments had been accomplished with German capital, were run by German
+engineers, equipped with German machines. Germany has bitterly reproached
+her former ally for the "ingratitude" of siding against the people who had
+brought her prosperity. Gratitude and ingratitude in business transactions
+are meaningless terms. The lender gets his profit as well as the borrower,
+usually before the borrower. If Italy has needed German capital, Germany
+has needed the Italian markets and Italian industries for her capital. The
+Germans surely have used Italy as their commercial colony. Italy bought
+her bathtubs, her electric machines, her coal, and her engines from
+Germany. For the past generation the German commercial traveler has been
+as common in Italy as the German tourist. In fact, was there ever a German
+tourist who was not in some sense a commercial agent for the Fatherland?
+
+To the international financier all this is simply intelligible--a matter
+of mutually desirable exchange. No debtor nation should feel aggrieved
+with a creditor nation: rather it should rejoice that it has attracted
+the services of foreign capital. Is the international economist right
+in his reasoning? Why does the delusion persist among plain people that
+the creditor is not always a benefactor? It is a very old and persistent
+delusion, so strong in the Middle Ages that interest was considered
+illegal and the despised Jews were the only people who dared finance
+the world. Abstractly the economists are undoubtedly right, yet I am
+fain to believe that the popular notion has some ground of truth in it
+too. Obviously, according to modern notions a country rich in natural
+resources, but poor in capital, inherited savings, must borrow money to
+"develop" itself. But granting for the moment that material exploitation
+of a country is as desirable as our modern notions assume it to be, even
+then there are reasons for grave suspicion of foreign lenders. Take abused
+Mexico. Its woes are in good part traceable to the pernicious influence
+upon its domestic politics of the foreign capital which its riches have
+attracted. One might instance the United States as an example of
+beneficial exploitation by foreign capital, but with us it must be
+remembered the lender has had neither industrial nor political power.
+We have always been strong enough to manage our affairs ourselves and
+satisfy our creditors with their interest--if need be with their
+principal. We have drawn on the European horde as upon an international
+bank, but we have absolutely controlled the disposition of the moneys
+borrowed. A weak country can hardly do that. Mexico could not. It had
+to suffer the foreign exploiter, with his selfish intrigues, in person.
+Italy has never been as weak as Mexico: it has maintained its own
+government, its own civilization. But the increasing amount of foreign
+investment, the increasing number of foreign "interests" in Italy, has
+been evident to every Italian. The hotels, the factories, the shops all
+testify patently to the presence of the stranger within the gates looking
+after his own interests, breeding his money on Italian soil.
+
+But why not? the dispassionate internationalist may ask. Why should not
+the Italian hotels be in the hands of Austrians, Germans, and Swiss; the
+new electrical developments be installed and run by Germans; the shops
+for tourists and Italians be owned by foreigners? There we cross the
+unconscious instinct of nationality, which cannot be ignored. Assuming
+that there is something precious, to be guarded as a chief treasure in
+the instinct of nationality, as I assume, there are grave dangers in too
+much friendly commercial "infiltration" from the outside. The indirect
+influences of commercial exploitation with foreign capital are the
+insidious, the dangerous ones. The dislike of the foreign trader, the
+foreign creditor, may voice itself crudely as mere envy, know-nothingism,
+but it has a healthy root in national self-preservation. For an Italian
+the German article should be undesirable, especially if its possession
+means accepting the German and his way of life along with his goods. The
+small merchant and the peasant express their resentments of foreign
+competition rawly, no doubt. Consciously it is half envy of the more
+efficient stranger. Unconsciously they are voicing the deep traditions
+of their ancestors, vindicating their race ideals, cherishing what is
+most enduring in themselves. They would not see their country given over
+to the stranger, whose life is not their life.
+
+One unpleasant aspect of the commercial invasion of Italy by the Teuton
+was his liking to live there, and consequently the amount of real estate
+which he was collecting on the Latin peninsula--so much that the lovely
+environs of Naples were fast becoming a German principality! These
+invaders were not traders, nor workers, but capitalists and exploiters.
+The process is known now as "infiltration." The German had filtered into
+Italy in every possible way, was supplanting its own native life with the
+Teutonic thing, as it had in France so largely. Italy could well profit
+from that experience of its sister nation. The Germans who filtered into
+French life, commercial, industrial, social, were German first and last.
+When the crisis came they turned from their adopted land, where they had
+lived on terms of cordial hospitality for ten, twenty, thirty years, and
+took themselves back to Germany, in many cases to reappear as the invader
+at the head of armed troops. The experience of France proved that the
+peaceful German resident was a German all the years of his life, not a
+loyal, vital factor in his adopted country--too often something of a spy
+as well. Therefore Italy might well be disturbed over the presence of so
+much Teutonic "infiltration" in her own beloved land. And why should
+Germany call her ungrateful when she sought to rid herself of her
+unwelcome creditors? German capital had made its five per cent on its
+investments, and better: it should not expect to absorb the life of the
+nation also.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In every debtor nation there must be an element which profits directly
+from the creditor relation. It assumes, naturally, the aspects of
+"progress," and consists of the richer trading class and bankers,
+sustainers of politicians. Such, I take it, were the followers of
+Giolitti, and such was Giolitti himself, a sincere admirer of Teutonic
+success and believer in the economic help which Germany could render
+to his kind of Italian. Such men as Giolitti are easily impressed by
+evidences of German superiority: they identify progress with the rapid
+introduction of German plumbing, German hotel-keeping, German electric
+devices, German banks. All these, they believe, help a "backward country"
+to come forward. They do not understand the finer spiritual risks that
+such material benefits may involve. They are not as sensitive as the
+humble peasant, as simpler citizens, to the gradual sapping of the
+precious national roots, of the internal debasement that may be going
+on through the process of "infiltration." They are too prosperous, too
+cosmopolitan to feel losses in national individuality. They realize
+merely the better hotels, the better railways, the improved plumbing
+in their country. Their souls are already half-Teutonized.
+
+In his dignified answer to the German Chancellor's vulgar attack on him
+in the Reichstag, Salandra referred to the long history of the Italian
+people, who "were civilized and leaders of the world" when the Teuton
+hordes were still savage. It was the spirit of that ancient civilization
+which did not consist primarily of industrial development that stirred
+in the souls of true Italians and made them scorn the advice of the
+Teutonized politician. He was "_traditore_" to all that nobler Italians
+hold dear--to the Latin tradition.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+_The Poet Speaks_
+
+The poet prophet has so long abdicated his rights among us moderns
+that we are incredulous when told that he has again exercised his
+function. That is the reason why the story of a poet's part in leading
+the Italian people toward their decision is received by Americans with
+such skeptical humor. And Gabriele d' Annunzio in the rôle! A poet who
+is popularly supposed to be decadent, if not degenerate, gossipingly
+known for his celebrated affair with a famous actress, whose novels and
+plays, when not denounced for their eroticism, are very much caviar to
+the "wholesome" man, so full are they of a remote symbolism, so purely
+"literary." "Exotic" is the chosen word for the more tolerant American
+minds with which to describe the author of "Il Fuoco" and "San Sebastian."
+
+In recent years the Italian poet has abandoned his native land, living
+in Paris, writing his last work in French, having apparently exiled
+himself for the rest of his life and renounced his former Italianism.
+Circumstances were stronger than the poet. The war came, and D'Annunzio
+turned back to his native land.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He came to Italy at a critical moment and characteristically he filled
+the moment with all the drama of which it was capable. His reappearance
+in Italy, as every one knows, was due to the ceremonies in connection
+with the unveiling of a monument to the famous Garibaldian band,--the
+Thousand,--in the little village of Quarto outside of Genoa, from which
+Garibaldi and his Thousand set forth on their march of liberation
+fifty-five years ago. The monument had been long in the making. The
+opportunity for patriotic instigation was heightened by the crisis of
+the great war. The King and his ministers had indicated, previously,
+their intention of participating in this national commemoration, but
+as the day grew near and the political situation became more acute,
+it was announced that the urgency of public affairs would not permit
+the Government to leave Rome. It may have been the literal fact that
+the situation precipitated by the presence of Giolitti demanded their
+constant watchfulness. Or it may well have been that the King and the
+Salandra Government had no intention of allowing their hand in this
+dangerous game to be forced by any reckless fervor of the poet. They
+were not ready, yet, to countenance his inflammation. At any rate,
+they left the occasion solely to the poet.
+
+How he improved it may best be gathered from his address. To the
+American reader, accustomed to a blunter appeal, the famous _Sagra_
+will seem singularly uninflammatory--intensely vague, and literary.
+One wonders how it could fire that, vast throng which poured out along
+the Genoa road and filled the little Garibaldian town. But one must
+remember that nine months of hesitation had prepared Italian minds for
+the poet's theme--the future of Italy. He linked the present crisis of
+choice with the heroic memories of that first making of a nation, "_Oggi
+sta sulla patria un giorno di porpora; e questo é un ritorno per una
+nova dipartita, o gente d'Italia!_"--A purple day is dawning for the
+Fatherland and this is a return for a new departure, O people of Italy!
+The return for the new departure--to make a larger, greater Italy, just
+as the Thousand had departed from this spot to gather the fragments of
+a nation into one. "All that you are, all that you have, and yourselves,
+give it to the flame-bearing Italy!" And in conclusion he invoked in a
+new beatitude the strong youth of Italy who must bear their country to
+these new triumphs: "O happy those who have more because they can give
+more, can burn more.... Happy those youths who are famished for glory,
+because they will be appeased.... Happy the pure in heart, happy those
+who return with victory, because they will see the new face of Rome,
+the recrowned brow of Dante, the triumphal beauty of Italy."
+
+The youth of Italy avidly seized upon the poet's appeal. The _Sagra_
+was read in the wineshops of little villages, on the streets of the
+cities. The voice of the poet reached to that fount of racial idealism,
+of patriotism, that glows in the hearts of all real Italians. He tied
+their heroic past with the heroic opportunity of the present. And he
+did not speak of the "unredeemed" or of the "aspirations." Instead,
+"This is a return for a new departure, O people of Italy!"
+
+The politician, awaiting in Rome the effect of his advice to choose
+the safe path, must have wondered, as too many Americans wondered,
+how this poet fellow could stir such mad passion by his fine figures
+of birds and sea! But there was a spirit abroad in Italy that would
+not be appeased with "compensations": the poet had the following of
+all "young Italy."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+D'Annunzio came to Rome. Not at once. A whole week elapsed after the
+_Sagra_ at Quarto, the 5th of May, before he reached Rome--a week of
+growing tumult, of anti-Giolitti demonstrations, in which his glowing
+words could sink like hot wine into the hearts of the people. The delay
+was well considered. If the poet had seized the occasion of Quarto, he
+made his appearance on the larger scene after the interest of the whole
+nation had been heightened by reading his address.
+
+I was one of the immense throng that awaited the arrival of the train
+bringing D'Annunzio to the capital. The great bare place before the
+terminal station was packed with a patient crowd. The windows of the
+massive buildings flanking the square were filled with faces. There
+were faces everywhere, as far as the recesses of the National Museum,
+around the flamboyant fountain, up the avenues. There were soldiers
+also, many of them, inside and outside of the station, to prevent any
+excessive disturbance, part of the remarkable precaution with which
+the Government was hedging every act. But the soldiers were not needed.
+The huge throng that waited hour after hour to greet the poet was not
+rabble: it was a quiet, respectable, orderly concourse of Romans. There
+was a preponderance of men over women, of youth over middle age, as was
+natural, but so far as their behavior went, they were as self-contained
+a "mob" as one might find in Berlin.
+
+The train arrived about dusk, as the great electric lamps began to
+shine above the sea of white faces. To most the arrival was evident
+merely from the swaying of the dense human mass, from the cadence
+of the Garibaldian Hymn that rose into the air from thousands of
+throats. As room was made for the motor-car, one could see a slight
+figure, a gray face, swallowed up in the surging mass. Then the crowd
+broke on the run to follow the motor-car to the hotel on the Pincian
+where the poet was to stay. The newspapers said there were a hundred
+and fifty thousand people before the Regina Hotel in the Via Veneto
+and the adjacent streets. I cannot say. All the way from the Piazza
+Tritone to the Borghese Gardens, even to the Villa Malta where Prince
+von Bülow lived, the crowd packed, in the hope of hearing some words
+from the poet. The words of Mameli's "L'Inno" rose in the twilight
+air. At last the little gray figure appeared on the balcony above the
+throng....
+
+It is impossible to give an adequate idea of the effect of what D'Annunzio
+said. His words fell like moulded bronze into the stillness, one by one,
+with an extraordinary distinctness, an intensity that made them vibrate
+through the mass of humanity. They were filled with historical allusions
+that any stranger must miss in part, but that touched the fibers of his
+hearers. He seized, as he had at Quarto, on the triumphant advance of the
+liberating Thousand and recounted the inspiring incidents of that day
+fifty years and more ago. As I stood in that huge crowd listening to the
+poet's words as they fell into the thirsty hearts of the people,--who
+were weary with too much negotiation,--I realized as never before that
+speech is given to man for more than reason. The words were not merely
+beautiful in themselves: they flamed with passion and they touched into
+flame that something of heroic passion in the hearts of all men which
+makes them transcend themselves. The crowd sighed as if it saw visions,
+and there rose instinctively in response the familiar strains of the
+Garibaldian Hymn.
+
+Italy had found its voice! The poet did not speak of "compensations,"
+a little more of Trent and Trieste, of a more strategic frontier. He
+stirred them with visions of their past and their future. He voiced
+their scorns. "We are not, we will not be a museum, an inn, a picnic
+ground, an horizon in Prussian blue for international honeymoons!...
+Our genius calls us to put our imprint on the molten matter of the new
+world.... Let there breathe once more in our heaven that air which flames
+in the prodigious song of Dante in which he describes the flight of the
+Roman eagle, of your eagle, citizens!... Italy is arming, not for the
+burlesque, but for a serious combat.... _Viva, viva Roma_, without shame,
+_viva_ the great and pure Italy!"
+
+That was the voice which called Italy into the war: the will that
+Italy should live "ever grander, ever purer, without shame." The poet
+spoke to the Latin in the souls of his hearers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He spoke again a number of times. In those feverish days when the
+nation was in a ferment, the restless youth of Rome would rush in
+crowds to the hotel on the Pincian and wait there patiently for their
+poet to counsel them. He gratified their desire, not often, and each
+time that he spoke he stung them to a fuller consciousness of will.
+He spoke of the larger Italy to be, and they knew that he did not mean
+an enlargement of boundaries. He spoke clearly, briefly, intensely.
+It was once more the indubitable voice of the poet and prophet raised
+in the land of great poetry.
+
+D'Annunzio grew bolder. He recognized openly his antagonist--the traitor.
+The most dramatic of his little speeches was at the Costanzi Theater
+where a trivial operetta was being given, which was quickly swept into
+the wings. After the uproar on his entrance had been somewhat stilled,
+he spoke of Von Bülow and Giolitti and their efforts to thwart the will
+of the nation.
+
+"This betrayal is inspired, instigated, abetted by a foreigner. It is
+committed by an Italian statesman, a member of the Italian Parliament
+in collusion with this foreigner to debase, to enslave, to dishonor
+Italy.".... _Traditore!_ I never thought to hear the word off the
+operatic stage. From D'Annunzio's lips it fell like a wave of fire
+upon that inflammable audience. A grizzled, well-dressed citizen
+suddenly leaped to his feet, yelling,--"I will drink his blood, the
+traitor.... Death to Giolitti!"....
+
+While the big theater rocked and stormed with passion, outside on
+the Via Viminale barricades were being hastily thrown up. The cavalry,
+that had been sitting their mounts all day before Santa Maria Maggiore
+guarding the unwelcome Giolitti from the angry mob, had charged the
+packed street, sweeping it clear with the ugly sound of horses' hoofs
+on pavement and cries of hunted men and women. That was the end. The
+next morning, be it remembered, the politician sneaked away, and two
+days afterwards the Salandra Government returned to power. Rome, all
+Italy, became suddenly calm, purged of its passion, awaiting confidently
+the reopening of Parliament.
+
+The Government had won. The people had won. The poet had beaten the
+politician. For his was the voice to which the great mass of his
+countrymen responded.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+D'Annunzio spoke again admirably at those great gatherings of concord
+when the citizens of Rome assembled in the Piazza del Popolo and in the
+Campidolgio. The poet had made himself the spokesman of the new Italy
+which had found itself in the storm of the past agonizing weeks, and as
+such he was recognized by the Government. The King and the ministers
+accorded him audiences; he was given a commission in the army and
+attached to the general staff. Wherever he appeared he was received
+with acclamations, with all the honor that is accorded the one who can
+interpret nobly the soul of a nation. And the poet deserved all the
+recognition which he received--the throngs, the flowers, the _vivas_,
+the adoration of Italian youths. For he alone, one might say, raised
+the crisis from the wallow of sordid bargaining, from the tawdriness
+of sentiment, to a purer passion of Latin ambition and patriotism. He
+loftily recalled to his countrymen the finer ideals of their past. He
+made them feel themselves Latin, guardians of civilization, not traders
+for safety and profit.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Germans, naturally, have had bitter things to say about D'Annunzio.
+German sympathizers in America as well as the German Chancellor have
+sneered at the influence wielded in Italy's crisis by a "decadent"
+poet. Even among American lovers of Italy there has been skepticism
+of the sincerity of a national mind so easily swayed by a man who "is
+not nice to women." A peculiarly American view that hardly needs
+comment!
+
+Is it not wiser to assume that the case of D'Annunzio was really
+the case of Italy itself--conversion? The deepest passion in the
+poet's life came to him when, a voluntary exile in France, he witnessed
+the splendid reawakening of French spirit in face of awful danger.
+Living in Paris during the early months of the cataclysm, witness of
+the mobilization, the rape of Belgium, and the turn at the Marne, the
+heroic struggle for national existence in the winter trenches, he saw
+with a poet's vision what France was at death-grips with, what the
+Allies were fighting for, was not territorial gains or glory or even
+altogether selfish self-preservation, but rather, more deeply, for
+the existence of a certain humanity. This world war he realized is no
+local quarrel: it is the greatest of world decisions in the making.
+And the man himself was transfigured by it: he found himself in his
+greatest passion as Italy found herself at her greatest crisis. Latin
+that he is, he divined the inner meaning of the confused issues presented
+to the puzzled world. He was fired with the desire to light from his
+inspiration his own hesitant, confused people, to voice for them the
+call to the Latin soul that he had heard. For Italy, most Latin of all
+the heirs of Rome, with her tragic and heroic past, the war must be not
+a winning of a little Austrian territory, the redeeming of a few lost
+Italians, but a fight for the world's best tradition against the forces
+of death. Once more it was "_Fuori i barbari_," as it had been with her
+Latin ancestors.
+
+It seems to me no great mystery.
+
+In the poet's writing there are passages of a large historical
+understanding. Of all modern writers he is foremost Latin, in
+knowledge, in instinct for beauty and form, in love of tradition.
+Even in his erotic and mystical passages this vein of purest gold
+may be seen, this understanding of the potential greatness of the
+tradition into which he was born. What wonder, then, that the first
+fundamental passion of the mature man's soul should be his desire to
+proclaim once more the cause of Latin civilization, should be the
+ardor of fighting in his own manner with his weapon of inspired words
+the world battle? So it seemed to me as I listened to his voice in
+the stillness of that May night. The voice of Roman glory, of ancient
+ideals awoke an answering passion in the hearts of the thousands who
+had gathered there. "_Una grande e pura Italia ... sensa onta_." And
+it would be a lasting shame for Italy to keep out of the struggle
+that the allied nations were making, to take her "compensations"
+prudently and shrink back within a cowardly neutrality. Better any
+other fate.
+
+So it seemed to that throng of eager, soul-hungry Italians who stood
+beneath the balcony of the hotel on the Pincian and drank the poet's
+fiery message like a full-bodied wine. At last they had found
+themselves.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+_The Piazza Speaks_
+
+"The voice of the piazza prevailed," the German Chancellor sneered
+in his denunciation of Italy at the conclusion. It can easily be
+imagined, the picture he made to himself, in his ugly northern office
+on Friedrichstrasse, of the influence that upset all German pressure
+and sent Italy into the war on the side of the Allies; that defeated
+the industry of the skilled ambassador, the will of the wily politician.
+The Chancellor saw one of those large public squares in which Latin
+countries abound, open centers in their close-built cities, where so
+much of the common life of the people goes on, now as it has for hundreds
+of years. For the piazza, descending in direct tradition from the ancient
+Forum, is the public hall of citizens, where they trade, gossip, quarrel,
+plot, love, and hate, from the crone sunning herself in a sheltered nook
+over her bag of chestnuts to the grandee whose palace windows open above
+the noisy commonalty. The Chancellor saw this common meeting-ground, this
+glorified street, filled with a ragged mob of "the baser quality," as on
+the operatic stage, emptily vocal or evilly skulking for mischief, like
+the _mafia_, the _apache_. He saw this loose gathering of irresponsibles
+suddenly stirred to evanescent passion against the real benefactors of
+their country by the secret agents of the Allies, "corrupted by English
+gold," in the mechanical melodrama of the German imagination, marching
+to and fro, attacking the shops and homes of worthy Germans, howling and
+stoning, by mere noise drowning the sober protests of reflecting citizens,
+intimidating a weak king, connived at by a bought government, pushing a
+whole nation into the bloody sacrifice of war out of mere recklessness of
+rioting--a piazza filled with the rabble minority who have nothing to lose
+because they neither fight nor pay.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such a picture, reflected in Bethmann-Hollweg's splenetic phrase,
+is a complete delusion of the German mind. I was in Rome and saw the
+real piazza at work. I was on the streets all hours of day and night,
+and what I saw was nothing like the trite imaginings of the German
+Chancellor. As I have said in a previous chapter, the "demonstrations"
+did not begin in any perceptible form until the bungling hand of Prince
+von Bülow betrayed his intrigue with Giolitti and the politician's
+intention of defeating the Salandra Government in its preparations for
+war became evident. At no time did the rioting in the streets equal the
+violence of what a third-class strike in an American mill town can
+produce. Such as it was the Government showed the determination and
+ability to keep it strictly within bounds. Rome was filled with troops.
+Alleyways and courtyards oozed troops at the first shouts from the
+piazza: the danger points of the Corso, especially the Piazza Colonna
+on which the Chigi Palace, the residence of the Austrian Ambassador,
+fronts, were kept almost constantly empty by cordons of troops. All
+told, the destruction done by the mobs could not have amounted to
+several hundred dollars--a few signs and shop windows smashed, a few
+pavements torn up in the Via Viminale. It is true that after war was
+declared upon Austria there was some pillage of Austrian and German
+shops in Milan, which has been greatly exaggerated by the German and
+pro-German press; it was nothing worse than what happened in Berlin
+to English residents in August, 1914. And the Italian Government
+immediately took severe measures with the officials who had permitted
+the disorders--removing the prefect and the military commander of
+Milan.
+
+There is no saying, of course, what might have happened had the King
+offered the premiership to Giolitti, and had that astute politician
+been rash enough to accept the responsibility of forming a government
+in accord with his own _neutralista_ sympathies. It is more than
+likely that revolution would have ensued: possibly Italy would have
+entered the war as a republic. For the Italians are not Greeks, as
+has been amply proved. But the King of Italy, whatever his own
+sympathies may have been, showed plainly that he had enough political
+understanding not to run counter to the expressed will of his people,
+to deal with the "traitor." After a week of tempestuous inter-regnum,
+in which the piazza expressed itself passionately, the Salandra
+Government returned to power with all which that implied in foreign
+policy. Then the piazza became quiet. If the piazza must shoulder the
+responsibility of Italy's decision, it must be credited with knowing
+marvelously well its own mind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The constitution of this "mob" is worth attention. I saw it at
+many angles. I followed its first erratic flights through the streets
+when Salandra resigned and a gaping void opened before the nation. I
+waited for the poet's arrival at the Roman station, for hours, while
+the dense throng of men and women pressed into the great square and
+swelled like a dark pool into the adjoining streets. And I followed
+with the "piazza" in its instinctive rush to the hotel on the Pincian
+Hill to hear the voice of its spokesman. Again I was in the Corso when
+the plumed cavalry cleared the surging mass from the Piazza Venezia to
+the Piazza Colonna. I heard the people yell, "Death to the traitor
+Giolitti!" and "_Fuori i barbari!_" and sing Mameli's "L'Inno." I saw
+the uproar melt away in the soft darkness of the Roman nights, leaving
+the cavalry at their vigil before Santa Maria Maggiore, guarding the
+repose of Giovanni Giolitti.
+
+I can testify that the "piazza" was composed very largely of perfectly
+respectable folk like myself. It varied more or less as chance gatherings
+of men will vary. Sometimes there were more workingmen in dirty clothes,
+sometimes more youths and boys with their banners, sometimes more
+shouters and fewer actors. But the core of it was always that same mass
+of common citizenship that gathered anciently in the Forum, that to-day
+goes orderly enough to the polls in New York or Chicago,--plain men,
+rather young than old, who are so distinctly left on the outside of
+affairs, who must perforce turn to the newspaper for information and
+to the open street for expression, who relieve themselves of uncomplex
+emotions by shouting, and who symbolize the things they hate to the
+depth of their souls with personalities like Giolitti and occasionally
+shy bricks at the guarded home of authority. All this, yes, but not
+"riff-raff," not anarchist, nor _mafia_, nor _apache_. Nothing of that
+did I see those days and nights.
+
+The greeting to D'Annunzio was made by men of the professional and
+intellectual classes I should say, having wormed my way in and out
+of that vast piazza gathering. The daily crowds before the poet's
+hotel were composed chiefly of youths, at school or college, others
+in working dress. The noisiest, most inflammable of all these mobs
+was that in the Costanzi Theater the evening of D'Annunzio's appearance
+there. They were citizens--and their wives--who could afford to pay
+the not inconsiderable price charged--and seats were at a premium.
+The men around me in evening dress, who were by no means silent, came
+from the "classes" rather than the masses. The crowds that hung about
+the Corso and the adjacent squares were more mixed, but they held a
+goodly proportion of the frequenters of the Café Arragno. The worst
+that could be said against these casual gatherings was their youth.
+It is the way of youth to vent its passion in speech, to move and not
+to stand. Middle age stood on the sidewalks and watched, sympathetically.
+Old age looked down from the windows, contemplatively. But both old
+age and middle age consorted with youth in the great meetings of
+consecration in the Piazza del Popolo and the Campidolgio, after the
+will of the people had prevailed. And after all, youth must fight the
+wars, and pay for them for long years afterwards--why should it not
+have its say in the making of them as well as middle age and old age?
+The youths in the ranks of the patient, good-natured soldiers who did
+_piquet a mato_ all day and half the night in the Roman streets during
+that vocal week while the piazza spoke, were openly sympathetic with
+the mobs they were holding down. I knew some of the gray-clad boys.
+I strolled along the lines and saw the smiles, heard the chaffing
+give-and-take of citizen and soldier as the mob tried to rush through
+the double ranks that cordoned the streets. There was no hatred there,
+no violent conflict with authority. Each understood the other. The young
+officers seemed to say to the crowd,--"You may howl all you like, you
+fellows, but you mustn't throw stones or make a mess.... What's the
+good! War is coming anyway in a few days--they can't talk it away!"
+And the crowd replied heartily,--"You are all right. We understand
+each other. You are doing your duty. Soon you will be doing something
+better worth while than policing streets and saving that  traitor
+Giolitti's skin from us. You will be chasing the Austrians out of
+Italian territory, and many of us will be with you then!" And the
+young officers looked the other way when the members of the "mob"
+offered the tired soldiers cigarettes and chocolate, and sometimes
+slipped through the cordon on private business within the forbidden
+area. Only once, once only in all the excitement did the long-haired
+horsemen clatter through the streets in a serious charge, scattering
+the shrieking pedestrians. That was by way of warning, possibly as
+much to the Government as to the populace.
+
+Then the decision was made, and after the Salandra Ministry, in
+whom the people had confidence, had returned to power, the ministry
+that had broken with Austria and refused her grudging compromises,
+the piazza purred like doves and listened to long patriotic speeches
+from "representative citizens." No soldiers were needed to keep order
+in these immense gatherings. For all were citizens, then, piazza and
+palace alike in the face of war.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One easily understands the German Chancellor's scorn over any irregular
+expression of public opinion, his disgust that the loose public in the
+streets dares to vent any emotion or will other than that suggested to
+it by a strong government, above all daring to voice it passionately.
+In a nation such as Germany, where the franchise is so hedged about
+that even those who have it cannot effectively express their wills,
+where political opinion is supplied from a central fount of authority,
+where the nation goes into war at the command of the Kaiser and his
+military advisers, where a war of "defense" and all other national
+interests are controlled by the "high commandment," consisting at the
+most of forty or fifty men, while the remaining sixty-five millions of
+the people are obedient puppets, nourished on falsehoods, where the
+popular emotion can be turned on like an electric current at the order
+of the "high commandment,"--now against this enemy, now against that
+one,--first hate of English, then hate of Italians, now hate of
+Americans--it is natural that a high government functionary should
+despise all popular effervescence and misread its manifestations as
+merely the meretricious, bought noise of the mob, quickly roused in
+the Southern temperament and badly controlled by a weak, and probably
+corrupt, government. The elements in the piazza have no power in the
+close organization of Germany, no political expression whatever: all
+good citizens are instructed by a carefully controlled press how to
+think and feel and speak. To my thinking it is rather to the glory of
+the Latin temperament that it cannot be throttled and guided like the
+more docile Teuton nature, that when it feels vividly it will express
+itself, and that it can feel vividly, unselfishly in international
+concerns. The Latin cannot be made to march in blind obedience into
+the jaws of death. The piazza merely shouted what Italy had come to
+feel, that Teutonic domination would be intolerable, that at all cost
+the Austro-German ambitions must be checked, and the Latin tradition
+vindicated and made to endure. It was proved by the marvelous content,
+the fervid unanimity of patriotism that spread over Italy, once the
+great decision had been made.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Since those full May weeks the world has had an example of what no
+doubt the Imperial Chancellor considers the suitable method of dealing
+with popular sentiment. The sympathies of Greeks and Rumanians have
+been, since the opening of the war, with the allied nations, yet
+their Teutonized sovereigns have kept both countries from declaring
+themselves in favor of the Allies. The King of Greece has stretched
+the constitution to preserve a distasteful neutrality, which, if it
+were not for the failure of the Allies to make impressive gains in
+the first year of the war, would have doubtless cost him his crown.
+The Balkan States are near enough the actual theater of war to suffer
+acutely from fear, and a natural timidity worked upon by many German
+agents, more successfully than Prince von Bülow, has thus far kept the
+people of Rumania and Greece passive in a false neutrality. Bulgaria
+is a fine example of the perfect working of the German method. The
+piazza certainly had no hand in the intrigues of King Ferdinand of
+Bulgaria. The representatives of his people urged him to maintain at
+least neutrality, not to put the nation at war with its blood kin,
+against its best interest. But the thing had all been "arranged"
+between the German King of Bulgaria and the German Government through
+"negotiation." Germany had been successful in buying the coöperation
+of Bulgaria as it tried to buy Italy's neutrality, at the expense of
+Austria. There were other factors in the case of Bulgaria that worked
+to the German advantage, but the method is clear. Not the voice of the
+piazza, but the secret agreement of "responsible government," in other
+words, the control of despotic, German rulers. Italy may well be proud
+that she has a sovereign who faithfully interprets his responsibility of
+rule in a constitutional state and executes the will of his people--who
+listens also to the voice of the piazza, not merely to the arguments of
+the foreign diplomat. And Italy may also be proud that the piazza spoke
+at a dark hour in the Allies' cause, if not the darkest, when German
+arms were prevailing in the East; if the dangers of German conquest were
+not as close to Italy as with the Balkan States, they were not remote,
+as German threats too plainly showed.
+
+The Venezelos-Zaimis situation was impossible in Italy, though the
+circumstances were almost parallel, with Salandra and Giolitti. The
+piazza knew the deep Biblical truth, "He who is not for me is against
+me," and execrated the professed _neutralista_ Giolitti. But the Greeks,
+it seems, are more easily managed by a "strong" government and a German
+king. The end, however, is not yet in sight. It remains to be seen
+whether the path of prudent passivity is the safe one, even selfishly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Why, after all, should we feel so apologetic for the voice of the piazza?
+All popular government, even in the limited form of a constitutional
+monarchy such as Italy, is a rough, uncertain affair. "The House of Savoy
+rules by executing the will of the Italian people." Good! But how is that
+popular will to be determined? Not, surely, by taking a poll of the five
+hundred-odd Deputies of the Italian Parliament elected two years before
+the world was upset by the Teuton desire to rule. Those Deputies were
+chosen, as we Americans know only too well how, by mean intrigues of party
+machines, by clever manipulation of trained politicians like Giovanni
+Giolitti, who by their control of appointed servants--the prefects of the
+provinces--can throw the elections as they will, can even disfranchise
+unfriendly elements of the population. Manhood suffrage is not a precise,
+a scientific method of getting at public opinion. It is possibly the least
+accurate method of gauging the will of a people. Something other than the
+poll is needed to resolve the will of a nation. And when that will is
+determined it makes little odds what instrumentality expresses it. Even
+the Giolittian Deputies, when brought to the urn for a secret vote on the
+Salandra measures a week after the lively expression of popular will in
+the piazza, voted--secretly--against their neutral leader, in favor of
+war! They had been converted by the voice of the piazza--by other things
+also in all likelihood. If their votes had been taken ten days before,
+when Giolitti first arrived in Rome, the result would have been far
+different: as Salandra and his colleagues knew. In the end the Italian
+Parliament merely registered the will of the people, both men and women,
+which expressed itself, as it always must, in diverse ways, through the
+press, by the voice of the piazza, in public and private discussion,
+flightily, weightily, passionately, timidly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Will, individual or collective, is a mysterious force. What enters into
+that act of decision which results in will is never wholly apparent, from
+the least to the gravest matters. And no scheme of government, which
+admits the right of the individual citizen, plain and exalted alike,
+to be heard and obeyed, has discovered a perfect way of polling this
+collective will of the nation. Our electoral representative method and
+majority vote is surely rough, though better than the Bulgarian way. That
+right to vote, for which our women are so eagerly striving, as thinking
+men realize only too well, is an empty privilege. The will of a people is
+inaccurately registered, not made, by the vote. The voice of the piazza
+when deep enough and strong enough is as good as any other way, perhaps,
+of determining the collective will of a nation in a crisis; surely far
+better than the secret way of Ferdinand of Bulgaria. Further, the reason
+of the piazza on any vital fundamental matter, such as war, which means
+life or death, is as sure as your intelligence or mine, possibly surer,
+because the piazza, having less to lose or gain, feels and believes and
+acts more simply, basically. The Roman piazza, the people of Italy,
+reacted to the crime against Belgium, to the atrocities committed on
+priests and women and children, to the murders of the Lusitania,--all
+deeds of that ancient enemy whose barbarism had now reappeared, after
+centuries, under an intellectual and sophisticated mask with a blasphemous
+perversion of religious sanction. They reacted also, it might be, to their
+own sense of personal danger from an unprotected frontier dividing them
+from this unscrupulous enemy, to the wrongs of some thousands of Italians
+condemned to live under Austrian rule and fight her battles against their
+friends. They responded also to the glory of Garibaldi's Thousand, who had
+liberated their fathers from foreign domination and made a nation out of
+Italy, and they responded to the great past of their people from whom the
+essential elements of what men know to-day as civilization has spread over
+the world. All these emotions were hidden in that one cry,--"Out with the
+barbarians!"
+
+The voice of the piazza, with its simple unanimity, its childlike
+psychology, came nearer to expressing the soul of Italy than the German
+Chancellor can comprehend, than any sophisticated diplomat, who has
+associated only with "thinking" and "leading" people, can believe. The
+Latin soul of Italy which cursed its politician and thrilled at the words
+of its poet! That soul of a people which is greater than any individual,
+which somehow expresses itself more authoritatively through the simple
+people who must suffer for their faiths than through the intellectuals
+and the protected members of a society....
+
+"_Viva Italia!_" the tanned conscript leaning from the car window at
+Subiaco shouted back to his friends and home. And the old men and girls
+left in the fields raised their hats as the train passed and shouted in
+reply,--"_Viva Italia!_" It was not English gold, nor the desire for
+Trent and Trieste, that brought that cry to the boy's lips!
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+_Italy Decides_
+
+Whatever one may think of the piazza voice, whether the disposition is
+to sneer with the German or to trust with the democrat in its spontaneous
+expression, it is a matter of history now that Italy's decision had been
+made before the question came to a vote in the Chamber of Deputies, a
+fortnight or more before the reluctant ambassadors of the ex-Alliance
+backed into their waiting trains and departed homeward across the Alps.
+It is a significant fact of personal psychology that the crisis of a
+decision takes place before action results to calm the disturbed mind. So
+it was with Italy. Her decision had really been taken when the Lusitania
+sank, when the politician, in face of this fresh outrage, advised the
+safer course of neutrality, which would amount to a connivance with her
+former associates in their predatory programme. _Traditore!_ meant but
+one thing--a betrayal of the nation's soul. In the light of more recent
+events, since Italy entered the war, there are probably many Italians who
+secretly wish that the safer counsel had prevailed, that, like Greece and
+Rumania, Italy had "preserved a benevolent neutrality" in the great war,
+even possibly that she had concluded to make her bed in the Teutonic camp.
+If the world is to be Teutonized, they would argue, why put one's head in
+the wolf's jaw! There are prudent people of that stripe in every nation,
+but since the end of May they have kept silence in Italy. And it should be
+forever remembered to her honor that Italy made her decision in face of
+Teutonic successes. If the military situation did not look so black for
+the Allies at the end of May as it does this December, it looked black
+enough with the crumbling Russian resistance before Mackensen's phalanx.
+Neuve Chapelle had been a costly and empty victory. There had been no
+successful drive in Champagne and Artois to encourage those who bet only
+on winning cards. There were heavy clouds in the east, merely a sad
+silence along the western wall. It was long past Easter, when England
+had boastfully expected to open the Dardanelles and the truth was
+beginning to appear that Constantinople might never be reached by the
+allied operations in Gallipoli. Italy threw in her lot with the Allies
+in a dark hour, if not the darkest.
+
+The great decision which had lain in solution in the hearts of the
+people was evoked by events and made vocal by the flaming words of
+D'Annunzio, interpreted by a faithful king, who resisted the temptation
+to dethrone himself by calling Germany's hired man to power, and finally
+registered by the Deputies at Montecitorio on May 19. It was virtually
+made, I say, the tumultuous week that came on the resignation of the
+Salandra Government. What followed the return of the ministry to power
+was merely automatic, as peaceful as any day's routine. Parliament was
+called to meet on Wednesday, the 19th. The Sunday afternoon before, the
+piazza, and the palace and all other elements of Roman citizenship met
+in a great gathering of content and consecration at the foot of the
+Pincian Hill in the Piazza del Popolo, again the day after in the
+Campidolgio above the Forum. How fortunate a people are to have such
+hallowed places of meeting, steeped in associations of great events!
+
+It was a warm, brilliant, sunny day, that Sunday, and in the afternoon
+every one in Rome, it seemed, was as near the Piazza del Popolo as he
+could get. The meeting was addressed by a number of well-known Romans
+of varied political affiliations. But the high note of all the speeches
+was a fervid patriotism and harmony. Rome was calm, believing that it had
+chosen nobly if not wisely. On the Campidolgio, D'Annunzio again sounded
+the tocsin of the heroic Thousand, and lauded the army which had been
+belittled by the followers of Giolitti. Already the troops were leaving
+Rome.... Then Parliament opened. The meeting of the Deputies if memorable
+was short. The square and streets about Montecitorio had been carefully
+cleared and held empty by cordons of troops. There was to be no shouting,
+no demonstration within hearing of Parliament. Long before midday the
+Chamber was crowded with all the notables who could gain admission. The
+proceedings were extremely brief, formal. All knew that the die had been
+cast: what remained was for the army to accomplish. The Premier Salandra
+made a brief statement summarizing the diplomatic efforts that his
+Government had undertaken to reach a satisfactory understanding with
+Austria, the record of which could be followed in the "Green Book,"
+which was then given to the public. He informed the Chamber, what was
+generally known, that the Triple Alliance had already been denounced on
+the 5th of May, and he offered a "project of law," which was tantamount
+to a vote of confidence in the Government and which also gave the King
+and his ministers power to make war and to govern the country during the
+period of war without the intervention of Parliament. It thus authorized
+both the past acts of the Salandra Ministry and its future course. The
+measure, undebated, was voted on secretly. And it is significant that of
+more than five hundred Deputies present only seventy-two voted in the
+negative. Of these seventy-two who voted against the Government, some
+were out-and-out _neutralistas_, and some few were Socialists who had
+the courage of their convictions. The great majority of the Giolittians
+must have voted for war. Had they seen a great light since the piazza
+raised its voice, since their leader had fallen from his high place?
+Possibly they had never been with Giolitti on this vital national
+question. At least, the fact illustrates how representative government
+does roughly perform the will of its people when that will is clear
+enough and passionate enough: the will registers itself even through
+unwilling instruments.
+
+After the vote had been taken, the Chamber adjourned, and when the
+following day the Senate ratified, unanimously, the action of the
+Chamber of Deputies, Parliament was dissolved. Many of the members
+enlisted and went to the front. Since the end of May Italy has been
+autocratically governed. The decrees of the King and his ministers
+are law--an efficient method of governing a country at war, avoiding
+those legislative intrigues that latterly have threatened the concord
+of France.
+
+It is noteworthy that the Italian Senate voted unanimously for war.
+The Senate is not an elective body. It is composed of dignitaries, old,
+conservative men from the successful classes of the nation, who are not
+easily swayed by the emotions of the piazza. From this unrepresentative
+body might have been expected a show of resistance to the Government's
+measure, if, as Giolitti and the German party asserted, there was a
+serious sentiment in the country in favor of neutrality which had been
+howled down by the mobs. It is inconceivable that such a body could have
+been completely cowed by rioting in the streets. The unanimous vote of
+the Italian Senators is sufficient refutation of the Bethmann-Hollweg
+slur.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As I crossed the Piazza Colonna the morning Parliament opened, my
+attention was caught by a small crowd before a billboard. First one,
+then another passer-by stopped, read something affixed there, and,
+smiling or laughing, passed on his way. In the center of the board was
+a small black-bordered sheet of paper, with all the mourning emblems,
+precisely resembling those mortuary announcements which Latin countries
+employ. It read: "Giovanni Giolitti, this day taken to himself by the
+Devil, lamented by his faithful friends"; and there followed a list of
+noted Giolittians, some of whom even then were voting for war with
+Austria. A bit of Roman ribaldry, specimen of that ebullition of the
+piazza disdained by the German Chancellor; nevertheless, it must have
+bit through the hide of the politician, who for the sake of his safety
+was not among the Deputies voting at Montecitorio. Later I read in a
+Paris newspaper that Giolitti was to spend the summer as far away from
+the disturbance of war as he could get, in the Pyrenees, but it was
+rumored in Paris that the French Government, having intimated to its
+new ally that it did not wish to harbor Giolitti, the Italian politician
+was forced to remain at home. I believe that once since the "Caro Carlo"
+letter he has spoken to his countrymen, a patriotic interview in which
+he announced that he had been converted to the necessity of the war with
+Austria! Thus even the politician comes to see light. But Giovanni
+Giolitti, as the black-bordered card said, is dead politically.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With the votes of Parliament the Roman part in the drama, the
+civil part, was ended. Rome began to empty fast of soldiers, officers,
+officials. The scene had shifted to the north, where the hearts of all
+Italians were centered. There was a singular calm in the city. One
+other memorable meeting should be recorded, on the Saturday afternoon
+following the Parliamentary decision. If popular manifestations count
+for anything, the dense throng in the Campidolgio and later the same
+afternoon before the Quirinal Palace demonstrated the enthusiasm with
+which the certainty of war with Austria was accepted.
+
+There are few lovelier spots on earth than the little square of the
+Campidolgio on the Capitoline Hill and none more laden with memories
+of a long past. Led by a sure instinct the people of Rome crowded up
+the steep passages that led to the crest of the hill, by tens of
+thousands. In this hour of the New Resurrection of Italy, the people
+sought the hearthstone of ancient Rome on the Capitoline. About the
+pillars of the Cancelleria, which stands on Roman foundations, up the
+long flight of steps leading to the Aracoeli, even under the belly of
+the bronze horse in the center of the square, Italians thrust themselves.
+Rome was never more beautiful than that afternoon. Little fleecy clouds
+were floating across the deep blue sky. The vivid green of the cypresses
+on the slope below were stained with the red and white of blooming roses.
+In the distance swam the dome of St. Peter's, across the bend of the
+Tiber, and through the rift between the crowded palaces one might look
+down upon the peaceful Forum. The birthplace of the nation! Here it was
+that the people, the decision having been made to play their part in the
+destiny of the new world now in the making, came to rejoice. The spirit
+of the throng was entirely festal. And these were the people, working-men
+and their wives and mothers from the dark corners of old Rome, neither
+hoodlums nor aristocracy, the people whose men for the most part were
+already joining the colors.
+
+The flags of the unredeemed provinces together with the Italian
+flag were borne through the crowd up the steps of the municipal palace
+to wave beside Prince Colonna, as he appeared from within the palace.
+Mayor of Rome, he had that afternoon resigned his position in order to
+join the army with his sons. Handsome, with a Roman face that reminded
+one of the portrait busts of his ancestors in the Capitoline Museum
+close by, he stood silent above the great multitude. The time for oratory
+had passed. He raised his hands and shouted with a full voice--"_Viva
+Italia!_" and was silent. It was as if one of the conscript fathers had
+returned to his city to pronounce a benediction upon the act of his
+descendants. The people repeated the cry again and again, then broke
+into the beautiful words of Mameli's "L'Inno,"--"_Fratelli d' Italia._"
+
+Then the gathering turned to cross the city to the Quirinal, where the
+King had promised to meet them. The way led past one of the two Austrian
+embassies in the Piazza Venezia--a danger spot throughout the agitation;
+but this afternoon the crowd streamed by without swerving, intent on
+better things. On the Quirinal Hill, between the royal palace and the
+Consulta, where the diplomatic conferences are held, the people packed
+in again. The roofs of the neighboring palaces were lined with spectators
+and every window except those of the royal palace was filled with faces.
+On the balcony above the palace gate some footmen were arranging a red
+velvet hanging. Then the royal family stepped out from the room behind.
+The King, with his little son at his side, stood bareheaded while the
+crowd cheered. On his other side were the Queen and her two daughters.
+King Victor, whose face was very grave, bowed repeatedly to the cheering
+people, but said no word. The little prince stared out into the crowd
+with serious intensity, as if he already knew that what was being done
+these days might well cost him his father's throne. The people cried
+again and again,--_"Viva Italia, viva il re"_; also more rarely, _"Imperio
+Romano!"_ At the end the King spoke, merely,--_"Viva Italia, mi!"_
+
+Perhaps the presence of the German and the Austrian Ambassadors,
+who that very hour were at the Consulta vainly trying to arrange a
+bargain, restrained the King from saying more to his people then.
+Possibly he felt that the occasion was beyond any words. His face was
+set and worn. The full passion of the decision had passed through him.
+His people had desired war, and he had faithfully followed their will.
+Yet he more than any one in that crowd must know the terrible risk, the
+awful cost of this war. Those national aspirations for which his country
+was to strive,--Trent and Trieste, Istraia and the Dalmatian coast, in
+all a few hundred miles of territory, a few millions of people,--the
+well informed were saying would cost one hundred and fifty thousand
+Italian soldiers a month, to pick the locks that Austria had put along
+her Alpine frontier! No wonder the King of Italy met his people after
+the great decision in solemn mood.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The crowd melted from the Quirinal Square in every direction, content.
+Some stopped to cheer in front of the Ministry of War, which these days
+and nights was busy as a factory working overtime and night shifts.
+People were reading the newspapers, which in default of more vivid news
+contained copious extracts from the "Libro Verde." Yet the "Green Book"
+was not even now completed!
+
+The politician had spoken, the poet had said his fiery word to the
+people, the piazza had hurled its will, Parliament had acted and gone
+its way, the army staff was hastening north. Yet the Austrian Ambassador
+and his German colleague had not taken the trains waiting for them outside
+the Porta Pia with steam up. It was a mystery why they were lingering on
+in a country on the verge of hostilities, where they were so obviously
+not wanted any longer. Daily since Parliament had voted they had been at
+the Consulta--were there now in this solemn hour of understanding between
+the King and his people! Singly and together they were conferring with
+Baron Sonnino and the Premier. What were they offering? We know now that
+at this last moment of the eleventh hour Austria had wakened to the real
+gravity of the situation, and with Teutonic pertinacity and Teutonic
+dullness of perception made her first real offer--the immediate cession
+and occupation of the ceded territories she had set as her maximum, a
+thing she had refused all along to consider, insisting that the transfer
+be deferred to the vague settlement time of the "Peace." I do not know
+that if she had frankly started the negotiations with this essential
+concession, it would have made any real difference. I think not. Her
+maximum was insufficient: it nowhere provided for that defensible
+frontier, and it was but a meager satisfaction of those other aspirations
+of nationality which she despised. It still left a good many Italians
+outside of the national fold, and it still left Italy exposed to whatever
+strong hand might gain control on the east shores of the Adriatic. At all
+events, in this last moment of the eleventh hour, if the ambassadors had
+been authorized to yield all that Baron Sonnino had begun by asking, it
+would not have kept Italy from the war--now.
+
+Elsewhere I have dealt with the legal and strategic questions involved
+in the "Green Book." These diplomatic briefs, White or Yellow or Orange
+or Green, seem more important at the moment than in perspective. They
+are all we observers have of definite reason to think upon. But nations
+do not go to war for the reasons assigned in them--nothing is clearer
+than that. Like the lengthy briefs in some famous law case, they are
+but the intellectual counters that men use to mask their passions, their
+instincts, their faiths. According to the briefs both sides should win
+and neither. And the blanks between the lines of these diplomatic briefs
+are often more significant than the printed words.
+
+While Baron Macchio and Prince von Bülow, the Ballplatz and
+Friedrichstrasse, Baron Sonnino and his colleagues were making the
+substance of the "Green Book," the people of Italy were deciding the
+momentous question on their own grounds. The spirit of all Italy was
+roused. Italian patriotism gave the answer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"_Viva Italia!_" the boy conscript shouted, leaning far out of the
+car window in a last look at the familiar fields and roof of his
+native village. "_Viva Italia!_" the King of Italy cried, and his
+people responded with a mighty shout,--"_Viva Italia!_" What do they
+mean? In the simplest, the most primitive sense they mean literally
+the earth, the trees, the homes they have always known--the physical
+body of the mother country. And this primal love of the earth that
+has borne you and your ancestors seems to me infinitely stronger,
+more passionate with the European than with the American. We roam:
+our frontiers are still horizons.... But even for the simple peasant
+lad, joining the colors to fight for his country, patriotism is
+something more complex than love of native soil. It is love of life
+as he has known it, its tongue, its customs, its aspects. It is love
+of the religion he has known, of the black or brown or yellow-haired
+mother he knows--of the women of his race, of the men of his race,
+and their kind.
+
+Deeper yet, scarce conscious to the simple instinctive man, patriotism
+is belief in the tradition that has made you what you are, in the ideal
+that your ancestors have seeded in you of what life should be. Therefore,
+patriotism is the better part of man, his ideal of life woven in with
+his tissue. Men have always fought for these things,--for their own
+earth, for their own kind, for their own ideal,--and they will continue
+to give their blood for them as long as they are men, until wrong and
+unreason and aggression are effaced from the earth. The pale concept
+of internationalism, whether a class interest of the worker or an
+intellectual ideal of total humanity, cannot maintain itself before
+the passion of patriotism, as this year of fierce war has proved beyond
+discussion.
+
+Italian patriotism, which in the last analysis Italy evinced in
+making war against Austria, was composed of all three elements. Italian
+patriotism is loyalty to the Italian tradition, hence to the Latin ideal
+which is fighting a death battle with the Teutonic tradition and ideal.
+Teutonism--militaristic, efficient, materialistic, unimaginative,
+unindividual--has challenged openly the world. Italy responded nobly
+to that challenge.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+_The Eve of the War_
+
+Rome became still, so still as to be oppressive. Her heart was
+elsewhere,--in the north whither the King was about to go. Rome, like
+all the war capitals, having played her part must relapse more and more
+into a state of waiting and watching, stirred occasionally by rumors and
+rejoicings. The streets were empty, for all men of military age had gone
+and others had returned to their normal occupations. Officers hurried
+toward the station in cabs with their boxes piled before them. And the
+sound of marching troops also on the way to the station did not cease at
+once.
+
+Saturday, the 22d of May, I took the night express for Venice. The
+train of first- and second-class coaches was longer than usual, filled
+with officers rejoining their regiments which had already gone north
+in the slower troop trains. There were also certain swarthy persons
+in civilian garb, whom it took no great divination to recognize as
+secret police agents. The spy mania had begun. Theirs was the hopeless
+task of sorting out civilian enemies from nationals, which, thanks to
+the complexity of modern international relations, is like picking
+needles from a haystack. My papers, however, were all in order, and
+so far there had been no restrictions on travel; in fact no military
+zone had been declared, because as yet there was no war! When would
+the declaration come? In another week? I settled myself comfortably
+in my corner opposite a stout captain who rolled himself in his gray
+cloak and went to sleep. Other officers wandered restlessly to and fro
+in the corridor outside, discussing the coming war. It was a heavenly
+summer night. The Umbrian Hills swam before us in the clear moonlight
+as the train passed north over the familiar, beautiful route. If
+Germany should strike from behind at Milan, exposing the north of
+Italy? One shuddered. After Belgium Germany was capable of any attack,
+and Germany was expected then to go with her ally.
+
+One thing was evident over and above the beauty of the moonlit country
+through which we were rushing at a good pace, and that was the remarkable
+improvement in Italian railroading since my last visit to Italy a dozen
+years before. This was a modern rock-ballasted, double-tracked roadbed,
+which accounted in part for the rapidity and ease of the troop movements
+these last months. The ordinary passenger traffic had scarcely been
+interrupted even now on the eve of war. The terrors of the mobilization
+period, thanks to Italy's efficient preparation, were unfounded. It spoke
+well for Italy at war. It was a sign of her economic development, her
+modernization. Even Germany had not gone into the business of war more
+methodically, more efficiently. Italy, to be sure, had nine months for
+her preparation, but to one who remembered the country during the
+Abyssinian expedition, time alone would not explain the improvement.
+
+The railroad stations at Florence and Bologna were under military
+control, the quays patrolled, the exits guarded, the buildings stuffed
+with soldiers. I could see their sleeping forms huddled in the straw
+of the cattle cars on the sidings, also long trains of artillery and
+supplies. Shortly after daylight the guards pulled down our shutters
+and warned us against looking out of the windows for the remainder of
+the journey. A childish precaution, it seemed, which the officers
+constantly disregarded. But when I peeped at the sunny fields of the
+flat Lombard plain, one of the swarthy men in civilian black leaned
+over and firmly pulled down the shade. Italy was taking her war
+seriously.
+
+At Mestre we lost the officers: they were going north to Udine
+and--beyond. The almost empty train rolled into the Venetian station
+only an hour late. The quay outside the station was strangely silent,
+with none of that noisy crew of boatmen trying to capture arriving
+_forestieri._ They had gone to the war. One old man, the figure of
+Charon on his dingy poop, sole survivor of the gay tribe, took me
+aboard and ferried me through the network of silent canals toward the
+piazza. Dismantled boats lay up along the waterways, the windows of the
+palaces were tightly shuttered, and many bore paper signs of renting.
+"The Austrians," Charon laconically informed me. It would seem that
+Venice had been almost an Austrian possession, so much emptiness was
+left at her flight. But within the little squares and along the winding
+stony lanes between the ancient palaces, Venice was alive with citizens
+and soldiers--and very much herself for the first time in many centuries.
+The famous piazza recalled the processional pictures of Guardi. Only the
+companies of soldiers that marched through it on their way to the station
+were not gorgeously robed: they were in dirty gray with heavy kits on
+their backs. The bronze horses were being lowered from St. Mark's, one
+of them poised in midair with his ramping legs in a sling. Inside the
+church a heavy wooden truss had been put in place to strengthen the arch
+of gleaming mosaics. There was a tall hoarding of fresh boards along the
+water side of the Ducal Palace, and the masons were fast filling in the
+arches with brick supports. Venice was putting herself in readiness for
+the enemy. Even the golden angel on the new Campanile had been shrouded
+in black in order that she might not attract a winged monster by her
+gleam. From many a palace roof aerial guns were pointed to the sky, and
+squads of soldiers patrolled the platforms that had been hastily built
+to hold them.
+
+Out at San Niccolo da Lido, where I supped at a little _osteria_
+beneath the trees, a number of gray torpedo boats rushed to and fro
+in the harbor entrance, restless as hunting dogs straining at the
+leash. That night Venice was dark, so black that one stumbled from
+wall to wall along the narrow lanes in the search for his own doorway.
+War was close at hand: the menace of it, a few miles, a few hours
+only away, across the blue Adriatic, at Pola. In order to understand
+the significance of frontiers an American should be in Venice on the
+eve of war.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some hours later I awoke startled from a heavy sleep, the
+reverberation of a dream ringing in my ears. It was not yet dawn.
+In the gray-blue light outside the birds were wheeling in frightened
+circles above the garden below my balcony. Mingled in my dreams with
+the disturbing noise was the song of a nightingale--and then there came
+another dull, thunderous explosion, followed immediately by the long
+whine and shriek of sirens at the arsenal, also the crackle of machine
+guns from all sides. Now I realized what it meant. It was war. The
+Austrians had taken this way to acknowledge Italy's defiance. The enemy
+had threatened to destroy Venice, and this was their first attempt. Above
+the sputter of the machine guns and the occasional explosions of shrapnel
+could be distinguished the buzz of an aeroplane that moment by moment
+approached nearer. Soon the machine itself became visible, flying oddly
+enough from the land direction, not from the Adriatic. It flew high and
+directly, across Venice, aiming apparently for the arsenal, the Lido,
+the open sea.
+
+It was an unreality, that little winged object aloft like a large
+aerial beetle buzzing busily through the still gray morning sky, heading
+straight with human intelligence in a set line, bent on destruction. The
+bombs could not be seen as they fell, of course, but while I gazed into
+the heavens another thunderous explosion came from near by, which I took
+to be the aviator's bomb, distinguished by the sharpness of its explosion
+from the anti-aircraft bombardment. Other guns along the route of the
+enemy took up the attack, then gradually all became silent once more.
+Only the cries of the frightened birds circling above the garden and the
+voices of the awakened inhabitants could be heard. From every window and
+balcony half-dressed people watched the flight of the monoplane until it
+had disappeared in the vague dawn beyond St. Mark's.
+
+In another half-hour the sirens shrieked again and the machine gun
+on the roof of the Papadopoli Palace just below on the Grand Canal
+began to sputter. This time every one knew what it meant and there
+was a large gathering on the balconies and in the little squares to
+witness the arrival of the hostile aeroplane. It was another monoplane
+coming from the same land direction, flying much lower than the first
+one, so low that its hooded aviator could be distinguished and the
+bands of color across the belly of the car. It skirted the city toward
+the Adriatic more cautiously. Later it was rumored that the second
+aeroplane had been brought down in the lagoons and its men captured.
+
+Thereafter no one tried to sleep: the little Venetian bridges and
+passages were filled with talking people, and rumors of the damage
+done began to come in. Eleven bombs in all were dropped on this first
+attack, killing nobody and doing no serious harm, except possibly at
+the arsenal where one fell. I was at the local police station when
+one of the unexploded bombs was brought in. It was of the incendiary
+type containing petroleum. Also there had been picked up somewhere in
+the canals the half of a Munich newspaper, which seemed to indicate,
+although there was nothing of special significance in the sheet, that
+the monoplane was German rather than Austrian. Yet Germany had not yet
+declared war on Italy. But was it not the German Kaiser who had threatened
+to destroy Italy's art treasures? Were not the German armies in Flanders
+and France making war against defenceless, unmilitary monuments?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I realized now the necessity of those preparations to guard the
+treasures of Venice, priceless and irreplaceable--why the Belle Arti
+had been emptied, and the Colleoni trussed with an ugly wooden framework.
+But little at the best could be done to protect Venice herself, which lies
+exposed in all her fragile loveliness to the attacks of the new Vandals.
+The delicate palaces,--already crumbling from age,--the marvelous façade
+of the Ducal Palace with its lustrous color, the leaning _campanili_, the
+little churches filled with noble monuments to its great ones,--all were
+helpless before an aerial attack, or shelling from warships. Nothing could
+save Venice from even a slight bombardment, quite apart from such pounding
+as the Germans have given Rheims, or Arras, or Ypres. At the first hostile
+blow Venice would sink into the sea, a mass of ruins, returning thus
+bereaved to her ancient bridegroom.
+
+Italy is aware of the vengeful warfare she must expect. Great
+preparations for the defense of Venice have been made. The city might
+be ruined; it could not be taken. The gray destroyers moving in and
+out past the Zattere contrasted strangely with the tiny gondolas shaped
+like pygmy triremes. It was the mingling of two worlds,--the world of
+the gondola, the marble palace of the doges, of the jeweled church of
+St. Mark's, and the world of the torpedo boat and the aerial bomb,--the
+world as man is making it to-day. The old Venetians were good fighters,
+to be sure, not to say quarrelsome. War was never long absent, as may
+easily be realized from the great battle-pieces in the Ducal Palace.
+But war then was more the rough play of boisterous children than the
+slaughterous, purely destructive thing that modern men have made it. And
+when those old Venetians were not fighting, they were building greatly,
+beautifully, lovingly: they were making life resplendent.
+
+That awakening in the early dawn into the modern world of distant
+enemies and secret deadly missiles was unforgettable. Some one showed
+me a steel arrow which had been dropped within the arsenal, a small,
+sharpened, nail-like thing that would transfix a body from head to feet.
+These arrows are dumped over by the thousands to fall where they will.
+That little machine a mile and more aloft in the sky, busily buzzing
+its way across the heavens, is the true symbol of war today, not face
+to face except on rare occasions, but hellish in its impersonal will
+to destroy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A wonderful day dawned on Venice after the departure of the hostile
+aeroplanes, a day among days, and all the Venetians were abroad. The
+attack which brought home the actual dangers to them did not seem to
+dull their lively spirits. They were busy in the quaint aquatic manner
+of Venice. The little shops were full of people, the boatmen reviled
+one another in the narrow canals as they squeezed past, the _vaporetti_
+and the motor-boats snorted up and down the Grand Canal.
+
+Venice seemingly had accepted her liability to night attack as a new
+condition of her peculiar life.
+
+There were more soldiers than ever moving in the narrow, winding
+footpaths, the restaurants were full of officers in fresh uniforms.
+On the water-front beyond the Salute there was much movement among
+the destroyers. One of these gray seabirds went out at midnight, when
+war was declared, and took a small Austrian station on the Adriatic.
+They brought back some prisoners and booty which seemed to interest
+the Venetians more than the hostile aeroplanes.
+
+Yet with all this warlike activity it was hard to realize the fact
+of war in Italy, to remember that just over the low line of the Lido
+the hostile fleets were looking for each other in the Adriatic, that
+a few miles to the north the attack had begun all along the twisting
+frontier, that the first caravan of the wounded had started for Padua.
+As I floated that afternoon over the lagoons past the Giudecca, and
+the blue Euganean Hills rose out of the gray mist that seems ever to
+hang on the Venetian horizon, it was impossible to believe in the fact,
+to realize that all this human beauty around me, the slow accumulation
+of the ages of the finest work of man, was in danger of eternal
+destruction. Venice rose from the green sea water like the city of
+enchantment that Turner so often painted. Venice was never so lovely,
+so wholly the palace of enchantment as she was then, stripped of all
+the tourist triviality and vulgarity that she usually endures at this
+season. It was Venice left to her ancient self in this hour of her
+danger. She was like a marvelous, fragile, still beautiful great lady,
+so delicate that the least violence might kill her! In this dying light
+of the day she was already something unearthly, on the extreme marge
+of our modern world....
+
+That evening the restaurant windows were covered tight with shutters
+and heavy screens before the doors. The waiter put a candle in a saucer
+before your plate and you ate your food in this wavering light. There
+was not the usual temptation to linger in the piazza after dinner, for
+the cafés were all sealed against a betraying gleam of light and the
+Venetian public had taken to heart the posted advice to stay within
+doors and draw their wooden shutters. As I entered my room, the moon
+was rising behind the Salute, throwing its light across the Canal on to
+the walls of the palaces opposite. The soft night was full of murmuring
+voices, for Venice is the most vocal of cities. The people were exchanging
+views across their waterways from darkened house to house, speculating on
+the chances of another aerial raid tonight. They were making salty jokes
+about their enemies in the Venetian manner. The moonlight illuminated the
+broad waterway beneath my window with its shuttered palaces as if it were
+already day. A solitary gondola came around the bend of the Canal and its
+boatman began to sing one of the familiar songs that once was bawled from
+illuminated barges on spring nights like this, for the benefit of the
+tourists in the hotels. To-night he was singing it for himself, because
+of the soft radiance of the night, because of Venice. His song rose from
+the silver ripple of the waves below, and in the little garden behind the
+nightingale began to sing. Had he also forgotten the disturber of this
+morning and opened his heart in the old way to the moonlight May night
+and to Venice?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The enemy did not return that night, the moon gave too clear a light.
+But a few evenings later, when the sky was covered with soft clouds,
+there was an alarm and the guns mounted on the palace roofs began again
+bombarding the heavens. This time the darkness was shot by comet-like
+flashes of light, and the exploding shells gave a strange pyrotechnic
+aspect to the battle in the air. Again the enemy fled across the Adriatic
+without having done any special damage. Only a few old houses in the
+poorer quarter near the arsenal were crumbled to dust.
+
+Since that first week of the war the aeroplane attacks upon Venice
+have been repeated a number of times, and though the bombs have fallen
+perilously near precious things, until the Tiepolo frescoes in the
+Scalsi church were ruined, no great harm had been done. The military
+excuse--if after Rheims and Arras the Teuton needed an excuse--is the
+great arsenal in Venice. The real reason, of course, is that Venice is
+the most easily touched, most precious of all Italian treasure cities,
+and the Teuton, as a French general said to me, wages war not merely
+upon soldiers, but also upon women and children and monuments. It is
+vengefulness, lust of destruction, that tempts the Austrian aeroplanes
+across the Adriatic--the essential spirit of the barbarian which the
+Latin abhors.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are some things in this world that can never be replaced once
+destroyed, and Venice is one of them. And there are some things greater
+than power, efficiency, and all _kaiserliche Kultur_. Such is Italy
+with its ever-renewed, inexhaustible youth, its treasure of deathless
+beauty. As I passed through the fertile fields on my way from Venice
+to Milan and the north, I understood as never before the inner reason
+for Italy's entering the war. The heritage of beauty, of humane
+civilization,--the love of freedom for the individual, the golden mean
+between liberty and license that is the Latin inheritance,--all this
+compelled young Italy to fight, not merely for her own preservation,
+but also for the preservation of these things in the world against the
+force that would destroy. The spirit that created the Latin has not
+died. "We would not be an Inn, a Museum," the poet said, and at the
+risk of all her jewels Italy bravely defied the enemy across the Alps.
+This war on which she had embarked after nine long months of preparation
+is no mere adventure after stolen land, as the Germans would have it: it
+is a fight unto death between two opposed principles of life.
+
+"He who is not for me is against me." There is no possible neutrality
+on the greater issues of life.
+
+
+
+
+PART TWO--FRANCE
+
+
+I
+
+
+_The Face of Paris_
+
+I shall never forget the poignant impression that Paris made on me that
+first morning in early June when I descended from the train at the Gare
+de Lyon. After a time I came to accept the new aspect of things as normal,
+to forget what Paris had been before the war, but as with persons so with
+places the first impression often gives a deeper, keener insight into
+character than repeated contacts. I knew that the German invasion, which
+had swept so close to the city in the first weeks of the war, and which
+after all the anxious winter months was still no farther than an hour's
+motor ride from Paris, must have wrought a profound change in this, the
+most personal of cities. One read of the scarcity of men on the streets,
+of the lack of cabs, of shuttered shops, of women and girls performing
+the ordinary tasks of men, of the ever-rising tide of convalescent
+wounded, etc. But no written words are able to convey the whole meaning
+of things: one must see with one's own eyes, must feel subconsciously
+the many details that go to make truth.
+
+When the long train from Switzerland pulled into the station there
+were enough old men and boys to take the travelers' bags, which is
+not always the case these war times when every sort of worker has
+much more than two hands can do. There were men waiters in the station
+restaurant where I took my morning coffee. It is odd how quickly one
+scanned these protected workers with the instinctive question--"Why
+are you too not fighting for your country?" But if not old or decrepit,
+it was safe to say that these civilian workers were either women or
+foreigners--Greeks, Balkans, or Spanish, attracted to Paris by
+opportunities for employment. For the entire French nation was
+practically mobilized, including women and children, so much of the
+daily labor was done by them. The little café was full of men,--almost
+every one in some sort of uniform,--drinking their coffee and scanning
+the morning papers. Everybody in Paris seemed to read newspapers all
+day long,--the cabmen as they drove, the passers-by as they walked
+hastily on their errands, the waiters in the cafés,--and yet they
+told so little of what was going on _là-bas!_.... The silence in the
+restaurant seemed peculiarly dead. A gathering of Parisians no matter
+where, as I remembered, was rarely silent, a French café never. But I
+soon realized that one of the significant aspects of the new France
+since the war was its taciturnity, its silence. Almost all faces were
+gravely preoccupied with the national task, and whatever their own
+small part in it might be, it was too serious a matter to encourage
+chattering, gesticulating, or disputing in the pleasant Latin way.
+
+Will the French ever recover wholly their habit of free, careless,
+expressive speech? Of all the peoples under the trials of this war
+they have become by general report the most sternly, grimly silent.
+Compared with them the English, deemed by nature taciturn, have
+become almost hysterically voluble. They complain, apologize, accuse,
+recriminate. Each new manifestation of Teutonic strategy has evoked
+from the English a flood of outraged comment. But from the beginning
+the French have wasted no time on such _bêtise_ as they would call
+it: they have put all their energies into their business, which as
+every French creature knows is to fight this war through to a triumphant
+end--and not talk. An extraordinary reversal of national temperaments
+that! From the mobilization hour it was the same thing: every Frenchman
+knew what it meant, the hour of supreme trial for his country, and he
+went about his part in it with set face, without the beating of drums,
+and he has kept that mood since. Henri Lavedan, in a little sketch of
+the reunion between a _poilu_, on leave after nine months' absence in
+the trenches, and his wife, has caught this significant note. The good
+woman has gently reproached her husband for not being more talkative,
+not telling her any of his experiences. The soldier says,--"One doesn't
+talk about it, little one, one does it. And he who talks war doesn't
+fight.... Later, I'll tell you, after, when _it_ is signed!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were plenty of cabs and taxis on the streets by the time I
+reached Paris, rather dangerously driven by strangers ignorant of the
+ramifications of the great city and of the complexities of motor engines.
+Most of the tram-lines were running, and the metro gave full service
+until eleven at night, employing many young women as conductors--and
+they made neat, capable workers. Many of the shops, especially along
+the boulevards, were open for a listless business, although the shutters
+were often up, with the little sign on them announcing that the place was
+closed because the _patron_ was mobilized. And there was a steady stream
+of people on the sidewalks of all main thoroughfares,--at least while
+daylight lasted, for the streets emptied rapidly after dark when a dim
+lamp at the intersection of streets gave all the light there was--quite
+brilliant to me after the total obscurity of Venice at night! But my
+French and American friends, who had lived in Paris all through the
+crisis before the battle of the Marne,--with the exodus of a million
+or so inhabitants streaming out along the southern routes, the dark,
+empty, winter streets,--found Paris almost normal. The restaurants were
+going, the hotels were almost all open, except the large ones on the
+Champs Élysées that had been transformed into hospitals. At noon one
+would find something like the old frivol in the Ritz Restaurant,--large
+parties of much-dressed and much-eating women. For the parasites were
+fluttering back or resting on their way to and from the Riviera,
+Switzerland, New York, and London. The Opéra Comique gave several
+performances of familiar operas each week, rendered patriotic by the
+recitation of the _Marseillaise_ by Madame Chenal clothed in the national
+colors with a mighty Roman sword with which to emphasize "_Aux armes,
+citoyens!_" The Française also was open several times a week and some
+of the smaller theaters as well as the omnipresent cinema shows,
+advertising reels fresh from the front by special permission of the
+general staff.
+
+The cafés along the boulevards did a fair business every afternoon,
+but there was a striking absence of uniforms in them owing to the strict
+enforcement of the posted regulations against selling liquor to soldiers.
+That and the peremptory closing of cafés and restaurants at ten-thirty
+reminded the stranger that Paris was still an "entrenched camp" under
+military law with General Gallieni as governor.... The number of women
+one saw at the cafés, sitting listlessly about the little tables, usually
+without male companions, indicated one of the minor miseries of the great
+war. For the _midinette_ and the _femme galante_ there seemed nothing to
+do. A paternal government had found occupation and pay for all other
+classes of women, also a franc and a half a day for the soldier's wife
+or mother, but the daughter of joy was left very joyless indeed, with the
+cold misery of a room from which she could not be evicted "_pendant la
+guerre._" They haunted the cafés, the boulevards,--ominous, pitiful
+specters of the manless world the war was making.
+
+Hucksters' carts lined the side streets about the Marché Saint-Honoré
+as usual, and I could not see that prices of food had risen abnormally
+in spite of complaints in the newspapers and the discussion about
+cold storage in the Chamber of Deputies. Restaurant portions were
+parsimonious and prices high as usual, but the hotels made specially
+low rates, "_pendant la guerre,_" which the English took advantage of
+in large numbers. The Latin Quarter seemed harder hit by the war than
+other quarters, emptier, as at the end of a long vacation; around the
+Arch there was a subdued movement as between seasons. The people were
+there, but did not show themselves. One went to a simple dinner _à la
+guerre_ at an early hour. All, even purely fashionable persons, were
+too much occupied by grave realities and duties to make an effort for
+forms and ceremonies. Life suddenly had become terribly uncomplex, even
+for the sophisticated. In these surface ways living in Paris was like
+going back a century or so to a society much less highly geared than
+the one we are accustomed to. I liked it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Even at its busiest hours Paris gave a peculiar sense of emptiness,
+hard to account for when all about men and women and vehicles were
+moving, when it was best to look carefully before crossing the streets.
+It could not be due wholly to the absence of men and the diminution of
+business--there was at least half of the ordinary volume of movement.
+Nor was it altogether a cessation of that soft roar of traffic which
+ordinarily enveloped Paris day and night. It was not exactly like Paris
+on Sunday--except in the rue de la Paix--as I remembered Paris Sundays.
+No, it was something quite new--the physical expression of that inner
+silence, of that tenacity of mute will which I read in all the faces
+that passed me. Paris was living within, or beyond--_là-bas_, all along
+those hundreds of miles of earth walls from Flanders to the Vosges,
+where for nine months their men had faced the invader.
+
+Most of the women one met were in black, almost every one wearing some
+sort of mourning, for there was scarcely a family in France that had
+not already paid its toll of life, many several times over. But the
+faces of these women in black were calm and dry-eyed: there were few
+outward signs of grief other than the mourning clothes, just an enduring
+silence. "The time for our mourning is not yet," a Frenchman said whose
+immediate family circle had given seven of its members. With some, one
+felt, the time for weeping would never come: they had transmuted their
+personal woe into devotion to others....
+
+There was little loitering and gazing in at shop windows, few shoppers
+in the empty stores these days. Everybody seemed to have something
+important that must be done at once and had best be done in sober
+silence. Even the wounded had lost the habit of telling their troubles.
+Doctors and nurses related as one of the interesting phenomena in the
+hospitals this dislike of talking about what they had been through,
+even among the common soldiers. Most likely their experiences had been
+too horrible for gossip. There was a conspiracy of silence, a tacit
+recognition of the futility of words, and almost never a complaint!
+One day a soldier walked a block to give me a direction, and in reply
+to my inquiry pointed to his lower jaw where a deep wound was hidden
+in a thick beard. "A ball," he said simply. It was the second wound
+he had received, and that night he was going back to his _dépôt_. For
+they went back again and again into that hell so close to this peaceful
+Paris, and what happened there was too bad for words. It must be
+endured in silence.
+
+There were not many troops on the streets,--at least French soldiers
+and officers; there was a surprising number of English of all branches
+of the service and a few Belgians. The French were either at the front
+or in their _dépôts_ outside the city. On the Fourteenth of July, when
+the remains of Rouget de Lisle, the author of the _Marseillaise_, were
+brought to the Invalides, a few companies of city guards on horseback
+and of colonial troops in soiled uniforms formed the escort down the
+Champs Élysées behind the ancient gun carriage that bore the poet's ashes.
+There were many wounded soldiers, hopelessly crippled or convalescing, in
+the theaters, at the cafés, and on the streets. As the weeks passed they
+seemed to become more numerous, though the authorities had taken pains to
+keep Paris comparatively empty of the wounded. One met them hobbling down
+the Élysées under the shade of the chestnut trees, in the metro, at the
+cafés, the legless and armless, also the more horrible ones whose faces
+had been shot awry. They were so young, so white-faced, with life's long
+road ahead to be traveled, thus handicapped! There was something wistful
+often in their silent eyes.
+
+To cope with the grist of wounded, the mass of refugees and destitute,
+Paris was filled with relief organizations. The sign of some "_oeuvre_"
+decorated every other building of any size, it seemed. Apart from the
+numerous hospitals, there were hostels for the refugee women and
+children, who earlier in the war had poured into Paris from the north
+and east, workrooms for making garments, distributing agencies, etc.
+All civilian Paris had turned itself into one vast relief organization
+to do what it could to stanch the wounds of France. Of the relief and
+hospital side of Paris I have the space to say little: much has been
+written of it by those more competent than I. But in passing I cannot
+refrain from my word of gratitude to those generous Americans who by
+their acts and their gifts have put in splendid relief the timid
+inanities of our official diplomacy. While the President has been
+exchanging futile words with the Barbarian over the murders on the
+Lusitania, to the bewilderment and contempt of the French nation,
+the American Ambulance at Neuilly has offered splendid testimony
+to the real feelings of the vast majority of true Americans, also
+an excellent example of the generous American way of doing things.
+That great hospital, as well as the American Clearing-House and the
+individual efforts of many American men and women working in numberless
+organizations, encourage a citizen from our rich republic to hold up
+his head in spite of German-American disloyalty, gambling in munitions
+stocks, and official timidity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Already the French had realized the necessity of creating agencies
+for bringing back into a life of activity and service the large
+numbers of seriously wounded--to find for them suitable labor and
+to reëducate their crippled faculties so that they could support
+themselves and take heart once more. Schools were started for the
+blind and the deaf, of whom the war has made a fearful number. I
+remember meeting one of these pupils, a young officer, blind, with
+one arm gone, and wounded in the face. On his breast was the Service
+Cross and the cross of the Legion of Honor. He was led into the room
+by his wife, a young school teacher from Algeria, who had given up
+her position and come to Paris to nurse her fiancé back to life and
+hope. He was being taught telegraphy by an American teacher of the
+blind.
+
+In such ways the people of Paris kept themselves from eating their
+hearts out in grief and anxiety.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At three o'clock in the afternoons, when the day's _communiqué_ was
+given out from the War Office, little groups gathered in front of
+the windows of certain shops where the official report was posted.
+They would scan the usually colorless lines in silence and turn away,
+as though saying to themselves,--"Not to-day--then to-morrow!" The
+newsless newspapers abounded in something perhaps more heartening
+than favorable reports from the front--an endless chronicle of bravery
+and devotion, of valor, heroism, and chivalry in the trench. That is
+what fed the anxious hearts of the waiting people, details of the large,
+heroic picture that France was creating so near at hand, _là-bas_.
+
+There were few occasions for popular gatherings. The taste for
+"demonstrations" of any sort had gone out of the people. Sympathetic
+crowds met the trains from Switzerland that contained the first of
+the "_grands blessés_" the militarily useless wounded whom Germany at
+last concluded to give back to their homes. And I recall one pathetic
+sight which I witnessed by accident--the arrival of one of the long
+trains from the front bringing back the first "_permissionnaires_"
+those soldiers who had been given a three or four days' leave after
+nine months in the trenches. In front of the Gare de l'Est a great
+throng of women and children were kept back by rope and police, until
+at the appearance of the uniformed men at the exit they surged forward
+and sought out each her own man. There were little laughs and sobs and
+kisses under the flaring gas lamps of the station yard until the last
+_poilu_ had been claimed, and the crowd melted away into Paris.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Across the street from my hotel there was an elementary school; several
+times each day a buzz of children's voices rose from the leafy yard
+into which they were let out for their recess. Again the thin chorus of
+children's voices came from the schoolroom. It seemed the one completely
+natural thing in Paris, the one living thing unconscious of the war. Yet
+even the school children were learning history in a way they will never
+forget. In one of the provincial schools visited by an inspector, all
+the pupils rose as a crippled child hobbled into the schoolroom. "He
+suffered from the Germans," the teacher explained. "His mates always
+rise when he appears." A French mother walking with her little boy in
+one of the parks met a legless soldier, and turning to her child she
+said sternly, as if to teach an unforgettable lesson,--"Do you see that
+legless man? The _Boches_ did that--remember it!" In these ways the new
+generation is learning its history, and it is not likely to forget it
+for many years to come.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At dawn and dusk in Paris one was likely to hear the familiar buzz
+of the aeroplane, and looking aloft could detect a dark spot in the
+clear June sky--one of the aerial guard that keeps perpetual watch
+over Paris. Sometimes when I came home at night through the dark
+streets I could see the silver beams of their searchlights sweeping
+like a friendly comet through the heavens, or watch the dimmed lamp
+glowing like a red Mars among the lower stars, rising and falling
+from space to space. Often I was awakened in the gray dawn by the
+persistent hum of this winged sentry and looked down from my balcony
+into the misty city beneath, securely sleeping, thanks to the incessant
+watchfulness of these "eyes of Paris." The aviator would make wide
+circles above the silent city, then swiftly turn back toward Issy and
+breakfast. Thanks to the activity of the aerial guard the Zeppelins
+have done very little damage in Paris and latterly have made no
+attempts to sneak down on the city. It is too risky. They have succeeded
+in killing some peaceable folk near the Gare du Nord, in dropping one
+bomb on Notre Dame, I believe,--for which they have less excuse than
+even for Louvain or Rheims,--and in making a big hole close to the
+Trocadero. This after all the vaunted terrors of the Zeppelins! What
+they have done, what they could do at the best is of the nature of
+petty damage and occasional murder. Instead of terrorizing the Parisians
+the Zeppelin raids have merely roused a vivid sense of sportsmanship
+and curiosity among them--at first they had a real _réclame!_
+
+Day by day as I lived in Paris the city took on more of its ordinary
+activities and aspects. More people flowed by along the boulevards or
+sat at the tables in front of the cafés, more shops opened--even the
+great dressmaking establishments began to operate in an attempt to
+restore commercial circulation. More transients flitted through the
+city. There were more people of a Sunday in the Bois and at Vincennes.
+Considering that less than a year before the national government had
+left Paris, together with a million of its people, also that the
+battle-line had remained all these months almost within hearing, it
+was marvelous how quietly much of the ordinary machinery of life had
+been set running again. Yet Paris was not the same. It was a Paris
+almost wholly stripped to the outward eye of that parasitic luxury with
+which it has catered to the self-indulgent of the world. Paris--as had
+been the case with Italy--had returned under the stress of its tragedy
+to its best self--a suffering, tense, deeply earnest self. If the nation
+conquers--and there is not a Frenchman who believes any other solution
+possible--victory will be of the highest significance to the race. It
+will fix in the French people another character wrought in suffering--a
+deeper, nobler, purer character than her enemies, or her friends for that
+matter, have believed her to possess. Paris will never again become so
+totally submerged in the business of providing international frivolities.
+She has lived too long in the face of death.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+_The Wounds of France_
+
+The wounds of France are still bleeding. The trench wall still lies
+for four hundred miles across the fair face of the country from the
+Vosges to the North Sea, and the invader rules some of her richest
+provinces, in all an area equal to something less than a tenth of
+the whole.
+
+The wounds have already begun to heal in the marvelous manner of
+nature: already life has begun again in the valley of the Marne;
+the vineyards and grainfields run close up to the front trenches.
+Yet even where the scar has covered the wound it is plain enough to
+see how deep that wound has been. The scorched and bruised valley of
+the Marne, the ruined villages of Champagne and Artois, have been
+described many times by visiting journalists, yet it is worth while
+to record once more some of the outstanding features of this rape
+of France.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To begin with Senlis, which is one of the nearest points to Paris
+reached by the German cyclone in September, 1914. There are fewer
+older towns in France than Senlis, thirty miles or so northeast of
+Paris, the center of the old "Island of France." Once a Roman camp
+whose stout masonry walls can still be seen for considerable distances,
+it had a mediaeval castle, and, until the greater grandeur of Beauvais
+stole the honor, was a bishopric with a lovely small Gothic cathedral.
+Its lofty gray spire dominates the green fields and thick woods in the
+midst of which Senlis sleeps away the modern day. There are other
+curious and beautiful examples of Gothic building in Senlis: indeed,
+just here, the experts find the first workings of the principles of
+pure Gothic architecture, transforming the round-arched, thick-walled
+Norman building. If for nothing more Senlis would have amply earned its
+right to live always as the birthplace of French Gothic.
+
+What happened to Senlis when the German troops visited it can be
+seen at a glance to-day. From the railroad station at one end of
+the town to the green fields beyond the hospital on the Chantilly
+road at the other end, a black swath of burned and ruined buildings
+is the memento. These houses and stores were not shelled: they were
+burned methodically. The Germans arrived late in the afternoon of
+the 2d of September, in that state of nervous excitement and hysterical
+fear of _francs-tirailleurs_ that characterized them from the time
+they passed Liége. The Mayor of Senlis, an old man over seventy, was
+made to understand that he would be held responsible for the conduct
+of the citizens, and was ordered to have water and lights turned on
+in the town and a dinner for the German staff prepared at the chief
+hotel. While he was busy with these commands,--most of the inhabitants
+had fled that morning,--shots were exchanged in the lower end of the
+town between the Germans and the retreating French. Thereupon the usual
+order to burn and destroy was given, and the buildings along the main
+thoroughfare were set on fire. The mayor and six other citizens,
+gathered haphazard on the streets, were taken to a field outside the
+town and shot. There were other moving and significant incidents in
+the occupation of Senlis which are well authenticated, characteristic
+of the German method, but need not be repeated here.
+
+The older part of the town, the cathedral, the Roman wall fortunately
+escaped with only a few chance shell holes here and there. The black
+scar runs through the place from end to end, incontrovertible instance
+of the German thing, which has been visited by thousands of French and
+foreigners the past year. The wounds of Senlis are not deep: by
+comparison with much else done by the Germans they are almost trivial.
+The murder of the Mayor of Senlis was not a large crime in the German
+scale. But the whole is nicely typical: Senlis is the kindergarten
+lesson in the German method of making war.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As every one knows, the Germans breaking into France at Namur and
+Mons came on with unexampled rapidity from the north and east toward
+the south and west, circled somewhat to the west as they neared Paris,
+and then the 5th of September recoiled under the shock of the French
+offensive. For the better part of a week two millions of men struggled
+on a thousand different battlefields from Nancy and Verdun on the east
+to Coulommiers, Meaux, and Amiens on the south and west. This was the
+great battle of the Marne, which checked the German invasion. The
+pressure of this human cyclone, in general from northeast to southwest,
+was more intense in some places than others. One of the bloodiest storm
+centers lay east and west from the town of Vitry-le-François--from
+Sermaize-les-Bains on the east to Fère-le-Champenoise, Montmirail, and
+Esternay on the west. For fifty miles there in the heart of Champagne
+the path of the cyclone can be traced by the blackened villages, the
+gutted churches, the countless crosses in the midst of green fields.
+
+One thinks of Champagne as a land of vineyards, but here in the
+center and south of the fertile province there are few vines, mostly
+fields of ripening wheat, green alfalfa, or beets--long undulating
+swales of rich fields, cut by little copses of thick woods and by
+white poplar-lined highways as everywhere in France. It has peculiarly
+that smiling and gracious air of _la douce France_--gently sloping
+fields and woods and little gray stone villages each with its small
+church ornamented by the square tower and spire of Champenoise Gothic.
+And it was here that the blast struck hardest, along the little streams,
+in the thick copses, up and down the straight roads whose deep ditches
+lent themselves to entrenchment, and in almost every village and
+crossroads hamlet.
+
+It is a country of few towns, of many small villages, farm and manor
+houses. The buildings cluster in the hollows or about the crossroads,
+and sometimes they escaped the storm because the shells exchanged
+from hill to hill went quite over their roofs; again, as was the
+case with Huiron just outside Vitry or with Maurupt near by, they
+could not escape because they were perched on hills, and they were
+almost completely razed by the fierce fire that raked them for days.
+Sometimes they escaped shell and machine gun to be burned to the
+ground vengefully with incendiary bombs, as at Sermaize-les-Bains,
+where of nine hundred buildings less than forty were left standing
+after the Germans retreated. These instances are the saddest of all
+because so wanton! There was scarcely a single collection of houses
+in that fifty miles which I traversed which did not bear its ugly
+scar of fire and shell, scarcely a farmhouse that was not crumbled
+or peppered with machine-gun bullets. Miles of desolation may be
+seen in a couple of hours' drive around Vitry-le-François,--Favresse,
+Blesmes, Écrinnes, Thiéblemont, Maurupt, Vauclerc,--with acre upon
+acre of ruined buildings, a chimney standing here and there, heaps
+of twisted iron that once were farm machines, withered trees--and
+graves, everywhere soldiers' graves.
+
+The churches suffered most, probably because they were used for
+temporary defense. At Huiron the upper half of the thirteenth-century
+Gothic church had been shaved off--in the ten-foot deep mass of débris
+lay the richly carved capitals of the massive pillars. At Écrinnes near
+by the apse of the exquisite little church had been blown off, leaving
+the front and spire intact. At Maurupt the whole edifice, which commanded
+the rolling countryside for miles, was riddled from end to end. Again,
+I would enter an apparently sound building to find a pile of rubbish in
+the nave, a gaping hole in the roof. And the same thing was true about
+Bar-le-Duc to the east and Meaux to the west. It is safe to say that in
+a fifty-mile wide stretch from Nancy to the English Channel not one
+village in ten has escaped the scourge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I speak of the churches because of their irreplaceable
+beauty, the human tenderness of their relation with the earth.
+But even more poignant, perhaps, were the wrecks of little country
+homes--the stacks of ruined farm machinery, the gutted barns, the
+burned houses. In many cases not a habitable building was left after
+the cyclone passed. In one hamlet of thirty houses near Esternay I
+remember, all but seven had been devastated--by incendiary fire.
+Indeed, it was clearly distinguishable--the "legitimate" wrack of
+war, from the deliberate spite of incendiarism. Maurupt was the one
+case, Sermaize-les-Bains (where there was no fighting) the other. If
+it had been simple war, shell and machine gun, probably fifty per cent
+or more of the devastation would have been saved. But the German makes
+war against an entire country, inanimate as well as animate.
+
+The inhabitants of these ruins had come back in many instances--where
+else had they to go? Swept up before the blast of the cyclone, they had
+fled south over the fields and hard white roads, then crept back a few
+days after the cyclone had passed to find their homes pillaged, burned,
+their villages blackened scars on the earth. But they stayed there! The
+English Society of Friends has given some money with which to put up
+wooden huts, on which old men and Belgian refugees were working when I
+passed that way. There is a French charity that tries to outfit these
+new homes in the devastated districts, one of the numberless efforts of
+the French to put their national house in order. But for all that charity
+can do, the lot of these villagers is a bitter one: their strong men have
+gone to the front; old men, women, and children are left to scratch the
+fields, and exist miserably in the cellars, underneath bits of corrugated
+iron roof, in tiny wooden huts. But they have planted their potatoes, in
+the ruins in some cases, and have taken up sturdily the struggle of
+existence in the wreck of their old homes. The children play among the
+crumbling walls, the women go barefoot to the public well for water. The
+fields have been sown and harvested somehow. Until the Germans can kill
+off the French peasant women, they can never hope to conquer France.
+
+Compared with the burning of homes, the razing of villages, mere
+pilfering and looting seem commonplace, unreprehensible crimes. Yet
+the loss of property by plain theft is no inconsiderable item in that
+bill which France expects to present some day. The old châteaux that
+were fouled and gutted by the invader, the trainloads of plunder that
+went back to German cities, the emptied cellars and ransacked houses
+have fed the fire of disgust and loathing which the French feel for
+their foe. Yet they should not begrudge the invader the extraordinary
+quantity of good wine which he consumed on his raid, because the
+victory of the Marne was doubtless won in part by the aid of the
+champagne bottle!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I passed through the Marne valley the fields were being harvested
+for the first time since those fatal days in September. Among the
+harvesters were a number of middle-aged men with the soldiers' _képi_,
+who had been given leave to make the crop, which was unusually abundant.
+The fields of old Champagne, watered with the best blood of France, had
+yielded their richest returns. Outside the charred and crumbled ruins
+of the villages one might have forgotten the fact of war were it not for
+the graves. Here and there the corner of some wood where a battery had
+been placed was mowed as if cut by a giant reaper. The tall poplars
+along the roadsides had been ripped and torn as by a violent storm. Some
+hillsides were scarred with ripples from burrowing shells, and hastily
+made trenches had not yet been ploughed completely under. But over the
+undulating golden fields it would be difficult to trace the course of
+the tempest were it not for the crosses above the graves, thousands upon
+thousands of them,--singly, in clumps, in long lines where the dead
+bodies had been brought out of the copses and buried side by side in
+trenches, or where at a crossroads a little cemetery had been made to
+receive the dead of the vicinity.
+
+Often as you crawled along in a train you could follow the battle by
+the bare spots left in the fields around the graves. They will never
+be ploughed under and sown, not even the graves of Germans, not in
+the richest land. Generally they were carefully fenced off, almost
+always with a simple cross on the point of which hung the soldier's
+_képi_ whenever it was found with the body. It is remarkable, considering
+the scarcity of hands, the desolation of the country, the difficulty of
+existence, what tender care has been given these graves of the unknown
+dead. Many of them were decorated with fresh flowers or those metal
+wreaths that the Europeans use, and where a company lay together a
+little monument had been erected with a simple inscription. It would
+seem that these Champenoise peasants still retain some of that pagan
+reverence for the dead which their Latin ancestors had cultivated,
+mingled with passionate love for those who gave themselves in defense
+of _la patrie._
+
+So for years to come the beautiful fields of France will be strewn
+with these little spots of sanctuary where Frenchmen died fighting
+the invader. The fields are already green again: Nature is doing her
+best to remove the scars of battle from this land where so often in
+the past ages she has been called upon to heal the wounds inflicted
+by men. Nature will have completed her task long before the ruined
+villages can be restored, long, long before the scars in men's hearts
+made by this ruthless invasion can be healed. Another generation,
+that of the little children playing in the ruins of their fathers'
+homes, must grow up with hate in their hearts and die before the
+wounds can be forgotten.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Germans were shelling Rheims the day I was there. From the
+little Mountain of Rheims, five miles away on the Épernay road, I
+could see the gray and black clouds from bursting shells rise in the
+mist around the massive cathedral. An observation balloon was floating
+calmly over the hill beyond, directing the fire on the desolated city.
+It was necessary to wait outside the town until a lull came in the
+bombardment, and when our motor at last entered, it was like speeding
+through a city of the dead, with crushed walls, weed-grown streets,
+and empty silence everywhere save for the low whine of the big shells.
+With the five or six hundred large shells hurled into Rheims that one
+day, the Germans killed three civilians, wounded eighteen more, and
+knocked over some hollow houses already gutted in previous bombardments.
+They did not damage the cathedral that day, though several explosions
+occurred within a few feet of the building.
+
+There were no soldiers, no artillery in Rheims--there have not been
+any for many months. Of its one hundred and thirty thousand people,
+only twenty thousand were left hiding in cellars, skulking along the
+walls, clinging to their homes in the immense desolation of the city
+with that tenacity which is peculiarly French. In the afternoon when
+the fire ceased the boys were playing in the streets and women sat in
+front of their cellar homes sewing. They have adapted themselves to
+sudden death. They move about from hole to hole in the wilderness of
+shattered buildings. For the city had been gutted by the acre: street
+after street was nothing but an empty shell of walls that crumpled up
+from time to time and tottered over. Within lay an indescribable mass
+of household articles, merchandise, all that once had been homes and
+stores and factories. Around the cathedral there was a peculiar silence,
+for this quarter of the city which received most of the shells is
+absolutely deserted. The grass grew high between the stones in the
+pavement all about. The sun was throwing golden cross-lights over the
+battered walls as I came into the deserted square and stood beside the
+little figure of Jeanne d'Arc before the great portal. As seen from
+afar, now in the full nearer view, the amazing thing was the majesty
+of the windowless, roofless, defaced cathedral. Acres of other buildings
+have crumbled utterly, but not even the German guns have succeeded in
+smashing the dignity out of this ancient altar of French royalty. It
+still stands firm and mighty, dominating its ruined city, as if too old,
+too deeply rooted in the soil of France to be crushed by her enemies.
+After a year of bombardment it still raised its mutilated face in dumb
+protest above the crumbling dwellings of its people, whom it could no
+longer protect from the barbarian.
+
+Not that the Germans have spared the cathedral in their senseless
+bombardment of Rheims! From that first day, when their own wounded
+lay within its walls and were carried out of the burning building
+by the French, until the morning I was there, when a shell tore at
+the ground beneath the buttresses hitherto untouched, the Germans
+seem to have taken a special malignant delight in shelling the
+cathedral. They have already damaged it beyond the possibility of
+complete repair, even should their hearts at this late day be
+miraculously touched by shame for what they have done and their guns
+should cease from further desecration. The glorious glass has already
+been broken into a million fragments; many of the finely executed
+mouldings and figures--irreplaceable specimens of a forgotten art--have
+been crushed; great wall spaces pounded and marred. It is as if a huge,
+fat German hand had ground itself across a delicately moulded face,
+smearing and smudging with vindictive energy its glorious beauty.
+Rheims Cathedral must bear these brutal German scars forever, even
+should the vandal hand be stayed now. It can never again be what it
+was--the full, marvelous flowering of Gothic art, precious heritage
+from dim centuries long past. Like a woman at the full flower of her
+life who has been raped and defiled, all the perfection of her ripened
+being defaced in a moment of lust, she will live on afterward with a
+certain grandeur of horror in her eyes, of tragic dignity that can
+never utterly be erased from her outraged person....
+
+A French officer, speculating on the German intentions with that
+admirably dispassionate intelligence with which the French consider
+these brutal manifestations of the German mind, remarked, "At present
+they seem engaged in ringing the cathedral with their fire, as if to
+see how close they can come without hitting the building itself, but
+of course from that distance they must sometimes miss." One theory
+why the enemy pursues this unmilitary monument with such peculiarly
+relentless ferocity is that they enjoy the outcry which their vandalism
+creates. Moreover, it is a way of boasting to the world that they have
+not yet been expelled from their positions behind Rheims, are not being
+driven back. If any special explanation were needed, I should find it
+rather in the fact that Rheims is peculiarly associated with French
+history,--minster of her kings,--and its destruction would be especially
+bruising to French pride. William the Second probably swells with
+magnitude at the thought of destroying with his big guns this sanctuary
+of French kings. Some of the graven kings still cling to their niches
+in the lofty façade. Two have been taken to the ground for safety and
+look out with horror in their blind eyes at the ruin all about them.
+The little figure of Jeanne d'Arc, rescuer of a French king, still
+stands untouched before the great portal, astride her prancing horse,
+bravely waving her bronze flag. Around her were heaped garlands of
+fresh flowers, touching evidence that the city of Rheims still holds
+stout souls with faith in the ultimate salvation of their great church,
+who lay their tribute at the feet of the virgin warrior. Once she
+protected their ancestors from a less barbarous enemy.
+
+What use to enumerate the wounds and outrages in minute detail? For
+by to-day more of this unique beauty has gone to that everlasting
+grave from which no German skill can resurrect it.... Within, the
+cathedral has been less spoiled, but is even sadder. One walked over
+the stone pavement crunching fragments of the purple glass that had
+fallen from the gorgeous windows, now sightless. Once at this hour
+it was all aglow with color, radiating a mysterious splendor into
+the vaults of transept and nave. A shell had blasted its way into
+one corner, another had rent the roof vaulting near the crossing of
+transept and nave. The columns and arches were blackened by the smoke
+of that fire which caught in the straw on which the German wounded
+lay. There was something peculiarly forlorn, ghostly within the dim
+ruins of what was once so great, and I was glad to escape to the old
+hospital in the close, now turned into a hospital for the cathedral
+itself. Here on benches and in piles about the floor of the low-vaulted
+room had been gathered those fragments of statue and moulding that a
+pious search could rescue from the débris around the cathedral. In this
+room, while the German guns were still raining shells upon Rheims, an
+old man in workman's apron was already moulding casts of the faces and
+lines of the shattered stones so that in some happier day an effort to
+reproduce them might be made. I saw between his trembling old fingers
+the fine features of a stone angel which he was covering with clay. I
+know of nothing more beautifully eloquent of the French spirit than
+this labor of preservation. Within range of shell fire this old man
+was calmly working to save what he might of the beauty that had been
+so prodigally murdered. If spiritual laws are still operative in this
+mad world of ours, the Latin must endure and conquer because of his
+unshakable faith....
+
+At the hill on the Épernay road I looked back for a last view of the
+cathedral. The evening mist was already creeping over its scarred
+walls. With the two towers lifting the great portal to the sky, it
+dominated the valley, the ruined city at its feet, a monument of men's
+aspirations raising its head high into the sky in spite of the unseen
+missiles that even then were beginning once more their attack. I would
+that these words might go to swell that cry which has gone up from all
+civilized peoples at the sacrilege to Rheims! Even now something of its
+majesty and its glory might be saved if the German guns were silenced--if
+within the German nation there were left any respect for the ancient
+decencies and traditions of man. But I know too well with what contempt
+the Germans view such pleas for beauty, for old memories and loves. They
+are but "sentimental weakness," in the words of the "War Book," along
+with respect for defenseless women and children. The people who gloried
+in the sinking of the Lusitania will hardly be moved to refrain from the
+destruction of a cathedral. Rheims--unless saved by a miracle--is doomed.
+And it is because neither beauty nor humanity, neither ancient tradition
+nor common pity can touch the modern German, that this war must be fought
+to a real finish. There is not room in this world for the German ideal
+and the Latin ideal: one must die.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The tragedy of Rheims has been repeated again and again--at Soissons,
+at Arras, at Ypres, in every town and village throughout that blackened
+band of invaded France from the Vosges to the sea. Also the tragedy of
+exiled and imprisoned country folk, of ruined farms and houses, of mere
+destruction.
+
+The wounds of France are so many, the outward physical bleeding of
+the land is so vast, that volumes have been written already as the
+record. Very little can be said or written about another wound,--the
+lives of those in the invaded provinces behind the German lines,--for
+almost nothing is known as to what has happened there, what is going
+on now. A word now and then comes from that dead, no man's land; a
+rare fugitive escapes from the conqueror's hand. The military rule
+forbids any correspondence through neutrals, as is permitted prisoners
+of war, to those held "behind the lines." The inhabitants are kept as
+prisoners. Worse, they have been used at certain places along the front
+as bucklers against the fire of their countrymen--in a quarry near
+Soissons, at Saint-Mihiel. It is known that heavy imposts are laid upon
+them, as at Lille, and that the invader is exploiting this richest part
+of France's industrial territory. This last wound is, perhaps, the most
+serious of all for France, in this modern, machine war. Latterly rumor
+has it that the treatment of the inhabitants imprisoned behind the
+German lines has become less rigorous, because, as a French general
+explained,--"They hope to make peace with us--_quelle sale race!_"
+
+These wounds are still bleeding. They cannot be ignored. They, as
+well as the death, suffering, and agony of the long trench combat,
+make the faces of the French tense, silent. "To think that they are
+still here after a whole year since this happened!" a young Frenchman
+exclaimed in bitterness of soul as we looked out over the thickly
+scattered graves in the fields around Bercy. To him it was as if a
+crazed and drunken marauder had taken possession of his house, burned
+a part of it, and still caroused in another wing. The unforgettable,
+unforgivable wounds of France!
+
+The French, so clear-seeing, so reasonable even about their own
+tragedies, are bitter to the soul when they think of the brutality
+done to their _"douce France."_ To the French, quite as much as to
+the Bryanited American, war is a senseless, inhuman thing; but it
+becomes direfully necessary when the home has been burned and laid
+waste. The Gallic spirit cannot understand that spirit of malevolent
+destruction which vengefully wreaks its spite against defenseless and
+inanimate works of age to be reverenced, of art to be loved. There are
+certain scrupulosities of soul in the Latin that divide him from his
+enemy, more effectually than a thousand years of life and an entire
+world of space.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+_The Barbarian_
+
+The barbarian, as the Greeks used the word, was not necessarily a
+person or a people without civilization. Indeed, certain ancient
+peoples known as barbarians had a high degree of luxury, civilization.
+The Persians under the barbarian Xerxes were probably quite the equals
+in the mechanics of civilization of the Greeks, and the Egyptians could
+lay claim to a large amount of what even the Greeks considered culture.
+The barbarian was a person or a nation without a spiritual sense in his
+values. The barbarian was often strong, able, intelligent, "organized"
+as we say, but he was incapable of self-government: the barbarian nations
+were ruled despotically. Their position in the world depended upon the
+force and the ability of the particular despot who got control of their
+destinies. The barbarian peoples were often crude in what is called
+fine art. They neither believed in nor practiced those amenities of daily
+life which express themselves superficially in manners, more deeply in
+sensitive inhibitions, nor those amenities of the soul which are known
+as honor, justice, mercy. The barbarian despised as soft and degenerate
+such persons as permitted themselves to be trammeled in their conduct by
+non-utilitarian considerations. In his primitive state the barbarian's
+instinct was to destroy what he could not understand; as he became more
+sophisticated, his instinct was to imitate what he could not create.
+
+What, above all, the barbarian cannot appreciate is the suave mean
+of life, the ideal of individual human excellence, of a tempered
+social control, the liberty of the individual within the fewest
+possible restrictions to work out his own scheme of existence, his
+own civilization. For the barbarian mind recognizes only two sorts
+of beings--the master and the slave. One is a tyrant and the other
+is a docile imitation of manhood. The barbarian never totally dies
+from the world. In every race, in every nation, in every community
+fine examples of the barbarian instinct, the barbarian philosophy
+of existence can be found. I have known personally a great many
+barbarians,--American life is full of them,--and my knowledge of
+them, of their strengths and their limitations, has given me my
+understanding of the modern German as manifested in this world war.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Real truth often underlies popular nomenclature. It is neither accident
+nor a desire to abuse that has given the German the name of barbarian
+in the Latin nations. Just as the Latin peoples are the inheritors of
+Greek ideals, so the German peoples seem to be the active modern
+protagonists of all that the Greeks meant by their term "barbarian."
+The French before the war regarded the Germans as not wholly well-bred
+persons, lacking in some of those niceties of feeling and conduct which
+seemed to them important--"_parvenus_" as a French officer characterized
+his feeling about the race, and added the descriptive adjective
+"_sale_"--dirty. Since the war there has been ground into the French the
+more awful inhumanities of which these _parvenus_ are capable. Therefore,
+when they think of the German, there comes instinctively to their lips
+the ancient term of complete distinction,--_les barbares_,--by which is
+meant a person and a nation who are not governed by ideals of taste,
+honor, humanity, what to the non-barbarian are summed up in the one
+word "decency." The adjective that the officer used--"_sale_"--does
+not imply necessarily literal physical dirt, but a moral callousness
+and unrefinement of soul which in the spiritual realm corresponds with
+the term "dirty" in the physical. He sees the soul of the German as a
+dirty soul, unclean, unsqueamish. And this conception of the enemy has
+given to the French soldier something of that crusader spirit which has
+sustained him through his terrible conflict. As M. Émile Hovelaque has
+expressed it,--"France is fighting the battle of humanity, of the world,
+of America, of every nation, man, and child who are resolved to live
+their own life in their own way, under the dictates of their conscience,
+within the limits of the laws they have accepted." The battle of the
+world to push back once more the pest of barbarism! It is that which
+has roused French chivalry, French heroism, not merely the love of
+the _patrie_. Indeed, for the higher spirits the _patrie_ is closely
+identified with the non-barbaric ideals of humanity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The whole conscious world has had the manifestations of the new
+barbarism before its eyes for an entire year and more. It has recoiled
+in disgust from the invasion of Belgium, the sinking of the Lusitania,
+the shooting of Edith Cavell, from the wanton destruction of monuments.
+All these barbarities are indisputable facts, which may be explained
+and extenuated, but cannot be denied. There is another class of
+barbarities,--the so-called "atrocities,"--which are more easily denied,
+but which most people who have taken the trouble to examine the charges
+know to be equally true. The record of these multiplied atrocities is
+so enormous and so well authenticated that it would seem to me useless
+to add any words to the theme were it not for an amazing attitude of
+indifference to the subject on the part of many Americans. "We don't
+want to hear any more atrocity stories," they say. "Perhaps the
+atrocities have been exaggerated, probably there's truth on both sides.
+Anyway, war is brutal as every one knows." Some newspapers will not
+publish the atrocity charges, whether because of our popular prejudice
+against anything "unpleasant" unless freshly sensational or because of
+more sinister reasons, the reader may judge.
+
+This attitude is both evasive and cowardly. It is essential to
+understand the atrocity for a proper realization of the war and of
+the German menace. It is false to say that all war is barbarous, and
+that in every war similar atrocities have occurred. As Mr. Hilaire
+Belloc has well said,--"Men have often talked during this war ... as
+though the crime accompanying Prussian activities in the field were
+normal to warfare.... It is of the very first importance to appreciate
+the truth that Prussia in this campaign has postulated in one point
+after another new doctrines which repudiate everything her neighbors
+have held sacred from the time when a common Christianity first began
+to influence the states of Europe. The violation of the Belgian
+territory is on a par with the murder of civilians in cold blood, and
+after admission of their innocence, with the massacre of priests and
+the sinking without warning of unarmed ships with their passengers and
+crews. To regard these things as something normal to warfare in the past
+is as monstrous an historical error as it would be to regard the Reign
+of Terror during the French Revolution as normal to civil disputes
+within the states."
+
+It is the business of every person who is concerned about anything
+more than his own selfish fate to examine into the atrocity charges
+and to convince himself, not only of the truth, but of the more serious
+implications in their premeditated and persistent character. The record
+has been well made, fortunately, often in judicial form. It is already
+voluminous and being added to constantly. Best of all the evidence,
+perhaps, are the German diaries of soldiers and officers, extracts of
+which have been edited by Professor Bédier, of the Collège de France,
+with facsimile photographs of the texts. Next I should place in evidence
+the so-called German "War Book" ("Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege"), where
+under the convenient title of "Indispensable Severities" may be found
+the text for many of the worst atrocities committed in Belgium and
+France.
+
+If the atrocity charge against the Germans is false or exaggerated,
+it is surely time to know it, but no mere denial or general argument
+can be accepted in rebuttal. The world must convince itself of the
+truth. The German crimes have been too many and too public, too well
+authenticated by witnesses to be disproved by mere denial. The best
+public opinion of the world has condemned military Germany as a
+barbarous outlaw. The crimes committed with the connivance of the
+supreme military authorities, authorized by their instructions to
+their officers, have fouled the name German for eternity: it will
+be coupled with Vandal, Tartar, Barbarian.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I believe the atrocity charges to be substantially true in a vast
+majority of cases. Moreover, I do not believe that half the truth of
+them has been told or ever will be. My reasons for this belief in the
+atrocity charge are the following: First, undisputed crimes, such as
+the Lusitania and Cavell cases. A government that would sanction these
+murders would sanction all other atrocities. Second, the witness of
+persons in whose credibility I have confidence, such as French officers
+and civilians, nurses and doctors, whose occupations have thrown
+first-hand evidence in their way, who have personal knowledge of
+specific outrages. Third, from what I myself gathered while I was in
+France from the lips of abused persons. Although I did not look for
+atrocities, I could not avoid getting reports from such people as I
+met in the devastated territory of the Marne, weighing their stories,
+and estimating the validity of them.
+
+I believe in the truthfulness of that abbé of Esternay, who was one
+of the unfortunates that the Germans used as a screen before the
+operations of a body of troops. I believe in the truthfulness of the
+keen old peasant woman at Châtillon, whose home had been riddled by
+German bullets and who had been fired at when she took refuge in the
+cellar of her house, and of many others with whom I talked of their
+experiences during the early days of September, 1914. Unfortunately,
+there was no photographer at work those days along the Marne valley,
+though no doubt the German denying office would instantly impugn the
+evidence of a photograph of the act. Each one of us, however, has his
+own inner instinctive tests of truth to which he puts the credibility
+of a story, and I believe the abbé, the old woman, and many others
+who suffered abominably at the hands of German soldiers.
+
+One fact only too evident to anybody who has followed in German
+footsteps through the valley of the Marne is the part that mere
+drunkenness had in this affair. The flower of the German army was
+incredibly drunken throughout the advance into France. Pillage, rape,
+incendiarism followed inevitably. They are common crimes to be expected
+where an exhausted soldiery is inflamed with drink. But the cowardly
+slaughter of non-combatants, the wanton destruction of monuments, the
+brutal tyrannies toward conquered peoples--these are the blacker crimes
+against the German name.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Self-control is not a Teutonic ideal. Of all the psychological surprises
+that the war has revealed, the exhibition of the German temperament has
+not been one of the least. Not its frank philosophic materialism, which
+any one who had followed the drift of German thought and literature might
+have expected, but its extraordinary lack of self-control. English and
+Americans are taught that an individual who cannot master his own temper
+is unfit to master others. Yet here is a people pretending to world rule
+whose tempers individually are so little under control that they explode
+in senseless passion on the least provocation. The German nation froths
+with hate first against the English because they were neither as cowardly
+nor selfish as had been expected, then against the Italians because they
+would not listen to Prince von Bülow's song, latterly against Americans
+because the United States dared to question the divine right of Germany
+to do with neutrals what she pleased. Judging from the German press and
+from the Germans whom I have met, the German nation is living in a
+ferment of rage, all the more extraordinary as the fighting seems to
+have gone their way thus far. What would happen to this uncontrolled
+people should the war take an unfavorable turn and not supply them with
+daily victories? Self-control is not included in that famous German
+discipline. Uncontrolled tempers, drink, the ordinary fund of brutality
+in the pit of human beings with the extraordinary conditions of war
+will explain much of all this barbarism--but not all.
+
+The supreme evidence of German atrocities is to be found in the
+infamous "Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege," a singular revelation of
+national character in which the German general staff has summed
+up for young officers the principles that should govern the conduct
+of invading armies. One finds here,--"By steeping himself in military
+history an officer will be able to guard himself against excessive
+humanitarian notions; it will teach him that certain severities
+are indispensable to war, nay, more, that the only true humanity
+very often lies in a ruthless application of them." This convenient
+generalization covers the multitude of Belgian crimes. This interesting
+manual of conduct for officers further warns against "sentimentalism
+and flabby emotion," such as are embodied in the Hague Conventions,
+and after stating the generally accepted rule or custom of warfare
+warns that exceptions are always permissible where the officer deems
+exceptional severities are "indispensable." After perusing the
+"Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege," need one seek more evidence of German
+atrocities from the levying of confiscatory fines upon conquered
+peoples to the use of noncombatants as human screens in military
+operations? The germ of the barbarous system is there contained in
+its entirety.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the implication of all this is much deeper than might appear on the
+surface. Such a theory of warfare as is set forth in the "War Book," as
+has been exemplified throughout the war, having its climax to date in
+the murder of Edith Cavell, is not the result of uncontrolled passions
+wrought to ferocity. It is deliberate, preconceived, defended,--an
+article of faith intimately bound up with the German ideal of the state.
+There is the danger. That the precept of the higher military authorities
+is accepted by the general public may be seen in the following passage
+from the Hamburg "Fremdenblatt"--or is it but a press note inserted by
+the high commandment? "Toxic gases are simply a new instrument of
+warfare; they are condemned because they are not universally adopted....
+In warfare humanity does not exist and cannot exist. All the lucubrations
+of the Hague Conferences on this subject are childish babbling. New
+technical knowledge gives new arms to those who are not fools and know
+how to use them.... Knowledge creates power, power creates law, law
+creates humanity. All these are changing ideas and Germans are not
+disposed to discuss them during the war."
+
+An Indian on the warpath scalps, burns, tortures, and we say it is
+the Indian nature to do these things. So-called civilized white men
+have gone on the loose in and out of war and have done many shameful
+deeds: we blush for them and draw the veil. But what never before has
+been accomplished is to have barbarism deliberately inculcated as
+part of the policy of warfare by a so-called civilized state; also
+warfare considered to be the flower of statecraft. Clausewitz lays
+down the principle that war is the legitimate carrying-out of state
+policy; the state relies upon war to execute its designs. The German
+military authorities announce and print for the use of their officers
+that in war deviation from any recognized principle of conduct is
+permitted under the excuse of "indispensable severity"--for the sake
+of terrorizing hostile peoples--and humanitarianism is condemned as
+"sentimentalism and flabby emotion."
+
+There we have the gist of the whole affair--what makes the Frenchman
+instinctively consider the German to be a barbarian, what makes modern
+Germany the menace of the entire world. It is not its militaristic
+ideals, its mechanical civilization, not even its brutality and
+vulgarity, not even the ferocity of its warfare: it is the methodical
+application of this underlying principle of conduct which has been
+inculcated into the people so that they rejoice at the sinking of the
+Lusitania, which has been employed in this war systematically from the
+first day. This is the barbarian essence of the German character.
+
+It is not the raping of women, not the staff officers' drunken
+orgies in châteaux, not the looting and burning of houses, not the
+stupid treatment of Belgians and French "hostages," etc. All these
+are distressing but not necessarily characteristic. It is the principle
+of the legitimacy of evil provided only that evil works to the advantage
+of the German state. That is the vicious term in the German syllogism.
+The state can do no wrong: therefore the individual acting for the state
+can do no wrong. The one supreme end sanctioned by divine authority is
+the endurance and the magnification of the German state. Whatever a
+German may do or cause to be done with this holy end in view is not
+merely just and reasonable, but necessary and praiseworthy. Hence there
+follows, naturally, the vile system of German espionage, of propaganda
+in neutral countries, the indiscriminate use of the submarine weapon,
+terrorization, military murders of civilians, and all the rest of the
+long count against Germany. Assume the vital major premise and the rest
+follows inevitably, provided her citizens are both docile and have a
+natural fund of brutality.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"In warfare humanity does not exist and cannot exist. All the
+lucubrations of the Hague Conferences on this subject are childish
+babbling.... Knowledge creates power, power creates law, law creates
+humanity. All these are changing ideas."
+
+The world has known the barbarian always; we are all acquainted with
+him from personal experience. But the world has never before known a
+reasoned, intellectual barbarism, a barbarian that has elevated into
+a philosophy of human life with the sanctions of religion his instincts
+and impulses. And that is the menace of the German, not his force nor
+his brutality, but the risk that he can successfully impose upon the
+world such an atrocious creed, intimidating into imitation those cowardly
+souls whom he does not care to conquer. If Germany were to win this war,
+it would not be her bumptious aggression that the world ought to fear
+so much as the enormous impulse it would give to her detestable creed,
+to the principle of evil in the world. The danger for us Americans is
+greater than for others, not because of exposed coasts and an unprepared
+army, but because we are already tainted with the same raw materialism
+of belief. Too many individuals in America would find a sympathetic
+echo in their own hearts to the German creed of collective selfishness
+and barbarism.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One heard in Paris surprisingly little about German atrocities, less
+than in Boston and New York, much less than in London. Not that the
+French do not believe them: they know the bitter truth about German
+inhumanity as none others. With that admirable stoicism and lucid
+conservation of moral force displayed by the French from the beginning,
+they do not waste their strength in denunciation: they have accepted
+it as one of the terrible aspects of the evil they are fighting. They
+probably understand the German character as now wholly revealed better
+than the rest of the world and are not so much surprised by its
+manifestations. They have examined the German, and have fortified
+themselves against his cruel power.
+
+But they cannot forget these incredible outrages. There are too many
+fresh examples--too many robbed and maltreated refugees, too many
+fatherless and motherless children, still coming to Paris by the
+trainload, whom they must provide for, too many relatives and friends
+who have been abused and murdered or whose property has been looted
+by German soldiers and officers. Also there are too many Frenchmen
+who have seen the horrors with their own eyes, too many doctors and
+stretcher-bearers shot down by those they were trying to aid, too many
+hospitals bombarded, too many wounded prisoners killed. The German
+atrocity is documented in France over and over, within the knowledge
+of millions. It will prove to be Germany's great stumbling-block after
+the war, when she looks about a shocked world for peoples to trade with.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the dining-room of the military club at Commercy, where a corps
+of the French army now has its headquarters, there is a wall painting
+of the last century representing the heroic deeds of Jeanne d'Arc.
+"That," said General C., pointing to the little figure on horseback,
+"is French! And the French have fought this war chivalrously--not
+against monuments, against women and children and old people, but
+as soldiers against soldiers!"
+
+The Latin is sometimes cruel--he has within him the capacity for
+cruelty--and the history of Latin peoples is stained here and there
+with ferocity. But the Latin has never organized cruelty methodically,
+has never elevated terrorization into a principle of warfare, a weapon
+of statecraft. For one thing he is too intelligent: he knows that
+cruelty begets reprisals, that brutality breeds hate. After Alsace
+the German should have known too much to try the same method in harsher
+forms upon Belgium and invaded France. But the barbarian learns no
+spiritual lessons. Persian atrocity, Saracen atrocity, Indian atrocity,
+Spanish atrocity--they have all failed. An enduring triumph was never
+won on that principle of "indispensable severity."
+
+It is barbarism as well as the barbarian which France is fighting,
+and the French know it, are profoundly conscious of it, from the
+cool, dispassionate philosopher, like Bergson or Boutroux or Hovelaque,
+to the girl conductor on the tram, the dirty _poilu_ in the trench.
+For more than a generation the French world has suffered from the
+fear of this new barbarian, and the time has come again, as it has
+come so many times before in history, for the momentous decision with
+the barbarian. Again as before it must come on the fields of France
+where the ancient curse of barbarism has been met and destroyed.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+_The German Lesson_
+
+The barbarian must be met on his own ground of force and efficiency,--"an
+eye for an eye," not with arguments or apologies, not even with numbers
+or wealth. The vital question for us all to-day is not how unprepared the
+Allies were for the onslaught of barbarism, but how far they have overcome
+their handicap, how thoroughly they have learned the barbarian's lesson.
+The varying degrees in which the different allied nations have grasped
+the meaning of the lesson and applied it tell us not merely their chance
+of survival, but also the probable outcome of the world decision. What
+that lesson is which Germany is teaching the world by blood and iron is
+a byword on men's tongues to-day: the value of it is another question.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Long before the war, Germany had published far and wide her scorn
+of her enemies. The Russians were an undisciplined barbarian horde;
+the English, stupid idlers who spent on their sport the energy that
+the industrious German devoted to preparing himself for world rule.
+As for the French, they were an amiable and amusing people, but
+degenerate--fickle, feeble, rotten with disease. Germany's hate
+was reserved for the English, her most ignoble slurs for the French.
+Needless to say, Germany has not found any one of her many enemies as
+wholly despicable as she had imagined them to be. Her miscalculations
+were greatest with France. That the French people are smaller in
+stature than the German, that they eat less and breed less, that by
+temperament they are cheerful and gay and witty convinced the dull
+German mind that the race had become degenerate and trivial,--negligible.
+This habit of contemptuously attributing to other peoples vileness and
+degeneracy because their social ideals differ from her own is part of
+that lack of imagination which is the Teuton's undoing.
+
+The courage, endurance, and high spirit displayed by the French have
+compelled German admiration. The French have become the most tolerable
+of all her enemies, and it is an open secret that for many months
+Germany has desired to win France away from her allies by an honorable,
+even advantageous peace. Meantime French prisoners are favored in the
+German prison camps, being accorded a treatment altogether more humane
+than that given the English prisoners or the Russians. But France has
+replied to the dishonorable advances no more than to the calumnies.
+One of the astonishing revelations of national psychology unfolded in
+the war has been the taciturnity of the French, their silent tenacity.
+For nearly two generations the nation has lived in expectation of an
+ultimate struggle for existence with the barbarian: now that it has
+come with more than the feared ferocity the French have no time or
+energy to waste in comment. They must expel the barbarian from their
+home and put a limit "for an hundred years" to the menace of his
+barbarism.
+
+That is in part why the clear-headed Latin has learned the German
+lesson faster than his allies.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What everybody knows by this time, and in America is repeating with
+sickening fluency, is that Germany is "efficient," not only militarily
+efficient, but socially and economically efficient--which these days
+amounts to the same thing. Germany is "organized" both for peace and
+war more efficiently than any other nation in the world. The two terms
+that this war has driven into all men's consciousness are "efficiency"
+and "organization." We in America, prone to admire the sheen of tin,
+have bowed down in greater admiration than any other people to German
+"efficiency." For efficiency values in the operations of life are just
+the ones we are most capable of appreciating, although our government
+and general social organization remain as lamentably inefficient as,
+say, the English. But being a business people we are fitted to admire
+business qualities above all others. The German army, the German state
+are magnificently run businesses! To some of us, however, the term
+"efficiency" has become nauseating because it has been associated with
+so much else that we loathe from the bottom of our souls. If we cannot
+have an "efficient" civilization without paying the price for it that
+Germany has paid,--the price of humanity, of beauty, the price of her
+soul,--let us return to the primitive inefficiency of a Sicilian
+village!
+
+Germany under a highly autocratic system of government has created
+a social machine of unexampled and formidable efficiency. The German
+realized before his rivals that war had become, like all other human
+activities, a matter of business on a huge scale. And he had prepared
+not merely the special instruments of war, but also the tributary
+business on this scale of modern magnitude: he had converted his state
+into a powerful war machine. All this which is now commonplace has
+become more glaringly evident to us onlookers because of the lamentable
+failure of England and Russia especially to meet the requirements of
+the new business. So incapable do they seem of learning the German
+lesson that to some Americans the cause of the Allies is doomed already
+to disaster. Certainly the English and the Russians have justified many
+of those bitter German taunts.
+
+It has not been so with France. The French also were caught
+unprepared--to their honor--like their allies. Can a real democracy
+ever be prepared for war? France, suffering grievously from the first
+blow dealt by the enemy, looked destruction in the face before the
+stand at the Marne. The famous victory of the Marne, I believe, is
+still unknown in Germany--I have been so informed by an American who
+spent last winter in Germany. The battle of the Marne may not rank
+in history as quite the greatest battle in the history of the world.
+The French may exaggerate its importance as a military event. The
+English have certainly exaggerated the part played by their little
+expeditionary force of less than a hundred thousand in "saving France."
+That is for others to dispute. But it was without any question a great
+moral victory for the French of the utmost tonic value to the nation.
+It saved France from despair, possibly from the annihilation that
+follows despair. And ever since the Marne victory, French confidence
+and _élan_ have been rapidly growing. During that bloody September week
+they realized that the barbarian was not invincible, the machine was
+not so perfect but that human will and human courage could resist it.
+Moreover, the machine lacked that quality of spirit which the French
+felt in themselves. As the months have dragged around an entire year
+and more in the trenches, almost contempt has grown in the mind of
+the French soldier for the formidable German machine. Strong as it
+is, it yet lacks something--that something of human spirit without
+which permanent victories cannot be achieved. Its strength can be
+imitated. The spirit cannot be "organized."
+
+French confidence is more than an official phrase, a mere bluff!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But--and just here lies the profound significance of it all--the
+French realized at once that in order to conquer the German machine
+they must create an equally efficient and powerful machine, which
+with that plus of human spirit and the inspiration of their cause
+would carry them over into victory. So while the English were berating
+the barbarian for his atrocious misconduct, advertising "business as
+usual," and filching what German trade they could, bungling at this
+and that, until they have become a spectacle to themselves, the French
+nation concentrated all its energies upon preparing an organization
+fit to meet the German organization. While General Joffre held the
+Germans behind the four hundred miles of trenches, France made itself
+over into a society organized for war--the new business kind of war
+which is waged in factory and railway terminal, not by gallant charges.
+"_Organiser_" has become in the Frenchman's vocabulary the next most
+popular word to "_patrie_." One implies, these days, the other.
+
+It is said that when Germany invaded France, the French had not a
+ton of their chief high explosive on hand. Some of its ingredients
+they had been getting from Germany! France lost her coal and iron
+mines and her largest factories the first weeks of the war and has
+not regained them. Yet early in last April, according to the official
+announcement, France was turning out six times as much ammunition as
+was deemed, before the war, the maximum requirement, and would shortly
+turn out ten times as much, which has ere this probably been greatly
+exceeded. Meanwhile, by April the artillery had been increased
+sevenfold. In attaining these results, France has accomplished a
+greater marvel relatively speaking than the most boasted German
+efficiency. She has had to get her coal from England, her ores from
+Spain, her machines for making guns and shells from us. She has had
+to improvise shell factories and gun plants from automobile factories,
+electric plants, railway repair shops--from anything and everything.
+I visited a small tile factory that was being utilized to make hand
+grenades. Innumerable small shops in Paris are engaged in munition
+work. The amount of ammunition bought in America by France has been
+grossly exaggerated by the German press. Latterly, France has employed
+American engineers to build large munition plants in France that will
+become the property of the Government.
+
+Throughout the spring the Paris newspapers appeared every morning
+with large headlines: "More guns! More ammunition!!" And they got
+them, made them. The headlines are no longer needed, for the
+superiority in shell and guns rests with the French, not with the
+Germans, on the western front.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+France, industrially crippled, has accomplished this marvel in
+one short year. The country has become one vast workshop for war.
+The Latin genius for organization on the small scale has met the
+German genius for organization on the large scale. The industrial
+transformation has been facilitated by the system of conscription
+over which the English have wrangled so long and so futilely to the
+mystery of their keener-witted allies. To the Frenchman conscription
+means merely the most effective method of applying patriotism, of
+coöperation for the common cause. France has mobilized not only her
+men, but her women and children, it might be said, so thoroughly have
+the civilian elements worked into the shops and other non-military
+labor. To sort out their labor and put it where it was most effective,
+to substitute women workers for men wherever possible, were the first
+steps in the huge work of social reorganization. There were no labor
+troubles to contend with, thanks to the conscription system and to
+the awakened patriotism of every element in society. France looked
+on aghast when her necessary supplies of coal were threatened by the
+strike of Welsh miners, averted only by the personal pleadings of a
+popular minister! To the Latin, more disciplined and more alive to
+the real dangers of the situation than the Anglo-Saxon, the English
+attitude was simply incomprehensible. Also France has not had her
+efficiency so seriously threatened by the liquor problem as has
+England: the military authorities have taken stern measures against
+this danger and have carried them out firmly. So far as the army
+itself is concerned, the drink evil does not exist.
+
+The manufacture of ammunition and cannon is but one element in the new
+warfare. France has had to feed, clothe, and maintain her armies under
+the same handicap, to meet all the unexpected requirements in material
+of the trench war. The French have rediscovered the hand grenade and
+developed it into the characteristic weapon of the war, have unearthed
+all their old mortars from the arsenals and adapted them to the trench,
+and created the best aerial service of all the combatants. Incidentally
+they have effectually protected Paris from air raids since the first
+months of the war by their careful aerial patrol. All this is aside from
+the task of putting the nation socially and economically on the war
+basis--in providing for the wounded, the dependent women and children,
+and also for a perpetual stream of refugees from Belgium and the invaded
+provinces, a burden that Germany has not yet had to carry.
+
+Not all this huge work of reorganization could be done immediately
+with equal success. The sanitary service suffered grievously, especially
+at the beginning,--needed all the help that generous outsiders could
+give,--still needs it. The percentage of death among the wounded is too
+high, of those returned to the army too low. There have been wastes in
+other directions due to haste, inexperience, political interference, but
+nothing like the wastes that England has suffered from the same causes,
+infinitely less than we should suffer judging from the ineptitudes we
+displayed in our little Spanish War.
+
+Probably France is not as well organized to-day for the war business
+as is Germany. Very possibly she never will be, which is not to the
+discredit of her people. The nation has had to do in one short year,
+grievously handicapped at the start, what Germany has done at her leisure
+during forty years. Moreover, the Latin temperament is intolerant of the
+mechanical, the routine, which is the glory of the German. Although the
+French have realized with marvelous quickness the necessity of war
+organization and have adapted themselves to it,--have learned the German
+lesson,--they are spiritually above making it the supreme ideal of
+national effort. Without argument they have accepted the conditions
+imposed upon them, but they do not regard the modern war business as
+the flower of human civilization.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mere preparation, no matter how scientific and thorough, is by no
+means the whole of the German lesson. The first months of the war
+we heard too much about German preparedness, too little about German
+character. By this time the world is realizing that military preparation
+is but one manifestation of that German character, and the real danger
+is German character itself. According to reports in her own newspapers
+Germany found herself running short of war materials after the first
+weeks of this extraordinarily prodigal war, which exceeded even her
+prudent calculations. But Germany had the habit of preparation and the
+social machinery ready to enlarge her war product. Without advertising
+her situation to the world, she provided for the new requirements so
+abundantly that she has not yet betrayed any deficiency in material.
+And while she was sweeping victoriously across northern France toward
+Paris, with the belief that the city must fall before her big guns,
+nevertheless her engineers took pains to prepare the Aisne line of
+defense, which saved her armies from disaster and enabled them to keep
+their tenacious grip on Belgium and northern France. This is the real
+strength of Germany, the real import of the bitter lesson she is
+teaching the world--the habit of preparation, discipline, organization,
+thrift. On the specifically military side the French seem to have learned
+this lesson well. They have fortified the ground between the present
+front and Paris with line after line of defensive works. The fields are
+gray with barbed wire. A few miles outside of the suburbs of Paris may
+be seen as complete a system of trenches as on the front, and the _képi_
+of the territorial digging a trench is a familiar sight almost anywhere
+in eastern France. It is inconceivable that any "drive" on the western
+front could be successful. The confidence of the French rests in part
+on these precautions.
+
+Whether the French can apply the inner meaning of the German lesson,
+can incorporate it into their characters and transmit it to their
+children, is a larger question for us as well as for them, for the
+whole world. But their success in applying it in this war is all
+the more noteworthy in contrast with the failure of their two great
+allies, who were not invaded, not handicapped at the start, as was
+France. The failure of Great Britain and of Russia to master the
+lesson is so obvious, so lamentable, that it needs no emphasis here.
+France, with the brunt of invasion only a few miles from the gates
+of Paris, her factories and mines lost, has provided herself very
+largely, has supplied Serbia with ammunition, Italy with artillery,
+Russia, England, and Italy with aeroplanes. For many months the
+thirty miles of the western front held by the English was defended
+with the assistance of French artillery.
+
+The Slav one expected to fail in getting his German lesson, for
+obvious reasons, especially because of his reactionary and corrupt
+bureaucracy. But not the Anglo-Saxon! As a clever French staff
+officer remarked,--"The two disappointments of the war have been
+the Zeppelins and the English." Without making a _post mortem_ on
+the English case, the Latin superiority is a phenomenon worth
+pondering. For the Anglo-Saxon, cousin to the Teuton, would supposably
+be the better fitted to receive the German lesson of organization
+and discipline. But that ideal of individual liberty, which England
+surely did not inherit from her Germanic ancestors, seems to have
+degenerated into a license that threatens her very existence as a
+great state. The English still talk of "muddling through somehow"!
+If the end of autocracy is barbarism, the end of liberty is anarchy.
+
+The Latin has kept the mean between the two extremes. The French,
+having fought more desperately in their great revolution for individual
+freedom than any other people, seem able to recognize its necessary
+limits and to subordinate the individual at necessity to the salvation
+of the nation. In the Latin blood, however modified, there remains
+always the tradition of the greatest empire the world has known, which
+for centuries withstood the assaults of ancient barbarism. The wonderful
+resistance and adaptability of the French to-day is of more than
+sentimental importance to mankind. All the world, including their foes,
+pay homage to the gallantry and greatness of the French spirit in their
+dire struggle, but what has not been sufficiently recognized is the
+significance to the future of the recovery by the Latin peoples of the
+leadership of civilization. We Americans who have both traditions in our
+blood, with many modifications, are as much concerned in this world
+decision as the combatants themselves.
+
+So much has become involved in the titanic struggle, so many
+subordinate issues have risen to cloud the one cardinal spiritual
+issue at stake, that we are likely to forget it or deny that there
+is any. Is the world to be barbarized again or not?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This reiterated use of the term "barbarism" is not merely rhetorical
+nor cheap invective. It is exact. One of the Olympian jests of this
+world tragedy has been the passionate verbal battles over the claims
+of respective "_Kulturs_" to the favor of survival. Why deny that the
+barbarian can have a very superior form of "_Kultur_" and yet remain
+a barbarian in soul? These pages on the German lesson are a tribute
+to Germany's special contribution to the world. Social and industrial
+organization, systematic instead of loose ways of doing things,
+prudence, thrift, obedience and subordination of the individual to
+the state, discipline--in a word, an efficient society. It is a great
+lesson! No one to-day can belittle its meaning. Possibly the remote,
+hidden reason for all this seemingly useless bloody sacrifice in our
+prosperous modern world is to teach the primary principles of the
+lesson. God knows that we all need it--we in America most after the
+Russian, and next to us the English. If the world can learn the lesson
+which Germany is pounding in with ruin, slaughter, and misery,--can
+discipline itself without becoming Teutonized,--the sacrifice is not
+too great. If the non-Germanic peoples cannot learn the lesson
+sufficiently well, then the Teuton must rule the world with "his old
+German God." His boasted superiority will become fact, destiny.
+
+That is the momentous decision which is being wrought out these days
+in Europe with blood and tears--the relative importance to mankind of
+discipline and liberty. The ideal is to have both, as much of one as
+is consistent with the other. In this country and in England may be
+seen the evil of an individualism run into license--the waste, the
+folly of it. And in Germany may be seen the monstrous result of an
+idolatrous devotion to the other ideal--the man-made machine without
+a soul. Between the two lies the fairest road into the future, and
+that road, with an unerring instinct, the Latin follows.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The German lesson is not the whole truth: it is the poorer half of
+the truth. An undisciplined world is more in God's image than a world
+from which beauty, humanity, and chivalry have been exterminated. But
+discipline is the primal condition of survival. Between these two poles,
+between its body and its soul, mankind must struggle as it has always
+struggled from the beginning of time....
+
+When I looked on the sensitive, suffering faces of Frenchwomen in
+their mourning, the wistful eyes of crippled youths, the limp forms
+of wounded men, the tense, bent figures of dirty _poilus_ in their
+muddy trenches, I knew that through their souls and bodies was
+passing the full agony of this struggle.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+_The Faith of the French_
+
+I do not mean religious faith, although that too has been evoked,
+reaffirmed by the trials and griefs of the war, but I mean faith in
+themselves, in their cause, in life. The unshakable faith of the French
+is the one most exhilarating, abiding impression that the visitor takes
+from France these days. It is so universal, so pervasive, so contagious
+that he too becomes irresistibly convinced, no matter how dark the present
+may be, how many victories German arms may win, that the ultimate triumph
+of the cause is merely deferred.
+
+There has never been the slightest panic in France, not during the
+mobilization when white-faced men and women realized that the dreaded
+hour had struck, not even in those days of suspense when the public
+began to realize that the first reports of French victories in Alsace
+were deceptive and that the enemy was almost at the gates of Paris.
+A million or so people left the city with the Government in order to
+escape the expected siege, but there was no panic, not even among the
+wretched creatures driven from their homes in the provinces before the
+blast of the German cyclone.
+
+Ever since the battle of the Marne the tide of confidence has been
+steadily rising, in spite of the tedious disappointments of trench
+warfare, the small gains of ground, the steady toll of lives, in
+spite of reverses in Galicia and Poland and the mistakes in the
+Dardanelles, in spite of English sluggishness and Russian weakness.
+Each reverse has been courageously accepted, analyzed, and found not
+decisive, merely temporary. Victory must come to the ones who can
+endure to the end, and the French know now that they can endure.
+"We can do it all alone, if we have to!" Again, "The Germans know
+that they are beaten already: they know it in Berlin as well as we
+do." This confidence is based on realities--first on the success with
+which France has learned the German lesson and completely reorganized
+her life for the business of war. "We were not ready last August--but
+we are now." Her machine is growing stronger in spite of the daily
+waste of life, while the German machine is weakening steadily.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The farther one gets into the military zone, the more fervent and
+evident is this confidence, until on the front it is an irresistible
+conviction that inspires men and officers alike. Even a novice like
+myself began to understand why the army is sure of ultimate victory,
+and the longer one stays at the front the more this faith of the
+French seems justified. In the first place, they have so well got
+that German lesson! The supply of shell and gun is so abundant, also
+of fresh troops in reserve thanks to "Papa" Joffre's frugality with
+human lives; the first, second, third lines--on _ad infinitum_ to
+Paris--are so carefully fortified, so alertly held against any "drive"!
+And the troops are so fit! They have made themselves at home in their
+new camping life behind the lines of dugouts and caves; they have
+become gnomes, woodsmen, cavemen, taking on the earth colors of the
+primitive world to which they have been forced to return in order
+to free the soil of their country. Then one sees the steady creeping
+forward of the front itself, not much as it looks on a small-scale
+map, but as the officers point out the blasted woods, or the brow of
+a hill over which the trenches have been slowly pushed metre by metre
+throughout the interminable weeks of constant struggle, one sees that
+gradually the French have got the upper hand, the commanding positions
+in long stretches of the trench wall. They are on the hills, their
+artillery commands the level fields before them. It is like the struggle
+between two titanic wrestlers who have swayed back and forth over the
+same ground so long that the spectator can see no advance for either.
+But one wrestler knows that the inches gained from his adversary count,
+that the body in his grasp is growing weaker, that the collapse will
+come soon--with a rush. He cannot tell fully why he feels this
+superiority, but he knows that his adversary is weakening.
+
+Perhaps a colonel on the front will tell you with elation,--"We know
+that the Boches across the way are discouraged, because our prisoners
+say so,--we take prisoners more easily than we did,--and they are all
+mixed up in their formations. We know that they have to drive their men
+to the job, that the lines about here are stripped as bare as they dare
+keep them. There used to be a lot of reserve troops behind their lines,
+but our aviators say there aren't any in X----any more! And they aren't
+as free with their _obus_ as they used to be, and they are 'old
+nightingales,' not first quality." Perhaps the staff officers will smile,
+knowing that the enemy is massing his forces elsewhere on the long front,
+but this trick of rapid change is becoming harder to perform, and more
+exhausting. At any rate, the plain _poilus_ in the front trenches are
+instinctively sure: "We'll have 'em now soon!" They have watched that
+grim gray wall opposite so long that, like animals, they can feel what
+is going on there on the other side.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At staff headquarters in a more contained, reserved way there is
+the same air of vital confidence. "Have you seen the new pump?" the
+general asked me. "We are pumping good water all over this sector
+into the front trenches, too.... Oh, we are _bien installé!_ ... It
+may be another year, two, perhaps more, but the end is certain. There
+is one man in the trenches, another just behind in reserve, still
+another resting somewhere in the woods for his week off, and more,
+all the men we want back in the _dépôts_!" And he turns the talk to
+the good health of his men, their fine spirit. For one of the human,
+lovable qualities of the officers whom I met is that they prefer to
+talk about the comfort, the _morale_, the _esprit_, of their men to
+discussing "operations."
+
+Just here I see where the French have risen above the machine idea
+of the German lesson. There is a something plus, over and above
+"preparation," "organization," "efficiency," which the Latin has
+and on which his confidence in ultimate victory largely rests. That
+is his belief in the individual, his reliance on the strength of the
+individual's spirit. To the French officer this seems the all-important
+factor in the army: military force depends ultimately upon the _esprit_
+of the individual which creates the _morale_ of the whole. Of course,
+the army must be equipped in the modern way and fought in the modern
+way with all the resources of science, with aeroplanes, bombs, motor
+transport, and heavy artillery. But without the full devotion of the
+individual, without the coöperation of his _esprit_, the army would
+be a dead machine, especially in this nerve-rending endurance contest
+of the trenches. Here is the Latin idea, which is absolutely opposed
+to the German machine theory of war.
+
+The German staff has done marvels with its machine. It hurls armies
+over the map of Europe of initiative and devotion in the common soldier,
+who in the Latin conception of the word remains a human being with a
+soul. An officer remarked to me, "We cannot have our men come from the
+trenches glum and downcast--a Frenchman must laugh and joke or something
+is wrong with him. So we started these vaudevilles behind the lines, and
+sports." Instead of more drill they give their men "shows," so that they
+may laugh and forget the horrors of the trench. Good psychology!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The civilian shines through every French soldier--the civilian who is
+a human being like you or me, with the same human needs. The officers
+chat and joke familiarly with their men. Comradeship is substituted for
+tyranny. France, one comprehends, is a real democracy, and still takes
+the ideal of equality seriously. When I asked an officer at Rheims why
+he had not had a day's leave in ten months while English officers went
+home on leave, he said, with a shrug,--"France is a republic: our men
+must get their leaves first."
+
+The machine system gives startling results--in a short campaign. But
+when it comes to an endurance contest, to the long, long strains of
+trench warfare, something other than drill and organization is necessary,
+something that will rouse the human being to the last atom of effort
+that he has in him. When men must stand up to their waists in icy water,
+live in the inferno of constant bombardment, not for hours and days, but
+for weeks and months, something other than discipline is needed to keep
+them sufficiently alive to be of use. Doctors tell how willingly,
+unquestioningly, the wounded go back to the hell they have escaped,--not
+once, but twice, three times. To evoke the capacity for heroism in the
+individual soldier has been the triumph of the Latin system.
+
+The faith of the French rests justly on their heroic resolution, their
+ability to endure as individuals, more than on the lesson learned of
+preparation and organization.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Faith is a belief in the evidence of things unseen. French faith
+is of many kinds, not purely material, not military. They believe
+so profoundly in the perfect justice and high importance of their
+cause that it would seem as if they counted upon the cause alone to
+win the victory. No nation, they say, ever spent itself in a better
+cause. Victims of an unprovoked attack, unprepared, which is the best
+evidence of peaceable will, witnesses of the outrage of a neighbor
+people, bleeding from the wounds of their own country,--what better
+cause for war could men have? And the Latin intelligence of the
+French enables them from the humblest to the highest to perceive the
+universality of the principles for which they are called upon to die.
+It is no selfish, not even a merely national, cause--it is the cause
+of nothing less than humanity in which they fight.
+
+The philosopher Bergson expressed this sublime confidence in the
+cause thus (I give the substance of his words from memory): "Not all
+wars can be avoided--perhaps nine out of ten can. But this one, no!
+For it is a war of principles. It will be a long war because the enemy
+is strong and we were unprepared. But we can wait the end confident in
+the result. The Germans have created a false belief, a wrong idea, and
+have carried that idea into action with extraordinary thoroughness. But
+the belief rests upon error. When the day comes that they meet reverses,
+when their idol of force no longer works miracles for them, then they
+will collapse, from within. There will be a general breakdown of
+personality from realizing the falsity of their idea. There lies our
+victory."
+
+The philosopher's belief is based on the faith that the principles
+of justice, of law, of humanity are stronger, more enduring than any
+organization of force no matter how efficient, for this is a moral
+world. And the individual or nation who relies upon might to enforce
+wrong must in the end, perceiving the irrationality of his world,
+collapse. The grinding of the mill may be heart-breakingly slow, but
+the grist is as sure as life itself.
+
+Similarly, the statesman Hanotaux has expressed "The Moral Victory":
+"It is the noblest, the highest of causes which has been submitted
+to the arbitrament of arms. Its grandeur justifies the terrible extent
+of the drama and the immense sacrifices it imposes. The material results
+of victory will be immense, the moral results will be even greater....
+Moral forces are superior to physical forces, and in spite of all they
+will have the last word.... Our youth has gone to the front in the
+serene conviction that it was fighting not only for the _patrie_, but
+for humanity, that this war was a sort of crusade, that they could
+claim place beside St. Louis and Jeanne d'Arc."
+
+It is that heroic consciousness of a righteous martyrdom that I read
+on the faces of the black-robed women in the street, too proud for
+tears; in the silent figures on the hospital beds, suffering without
+protest an agony too deep for words. And when I encountered a file
+of soldiers in the muddy trenches, flattening themselves out against
+the earth walls to let me pass, carrying pails of soup to the comrades
+up front, or sitting motionless beside their burrows along the trench
+wall, their hands clasping their rifles,--dirty, grimed, and bearded,--I
+saw the same thing in their tired eyes, their drawn faces. Mute martyrs
+in the cause of humanity, in _my_ cause, they were giving their lives
+for others, for _me_, not merely that the German might be driven from
+France, but that justice and honor and peace between men might prevail
+in the world!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Because the French people are inspired with the grandeur and the
+moral significance of their cause, they cannot understand a certain
+cynical attitude of mind, well illustrated by a former Senator of
+the United States, who has been high in the councils of the defunct
+Progressive Party. After spending ten days in Paris last spring, he
+remarked at a luncheon given him by some distinguished Frenchmen,--"Don't
+tell me about the justice of your cause or about the atrocities. I am
+not interested in that. What I want to know is, who is going to win!"
+Who is going to win! There spoke the barbarian mind. The barbarian
+mind cannot comprehend that the winning itself in a world cause is
+inextricably involved in the justice and worth of the cause.
+
+For the same reason the French people have been puzzled by the sort
+of neutrality preached and practiced at Washington since the outbreak
+of the war. It is plain enough that neither France nor England desires
+to have the United States go to war with Germany. We can help them
+better as a huge supply house than as an ally, much as that might
+offend our vanity. The French appreciate also our President's desire
+to keep his country at peace. They are a peace-loving people and know
+the frightful costs of war. But they cannot understand a neutrality
+that avoids committing itself upon a moral issue such as was presented
+to the world in Belgium, in the sinking of the Lusitania. And in spite
+of the strict censorship, which for obvious reasons has muzzled the
+French press in its comment upon our diplomacy with Germany, occasionally
+flashes of a biting scorn of the Wilson neutrality have appeared in print,
+as the following from Hanotaux: "We should be wanting truly in frankness
+toward our great sister republic if we left her in the belief that this
+series of documents, of a tone particularly friendly and affectionate,
+addressed to the German Government after such acts as theirs, had not
+occasioned in France a certain surprise.... Up to this time the Allies,
+who have not, God be praised, compromised or even menaced the life of
+any neutral, of any American, have not received the twentieth part of
+these friendly terms that the German Government has brought forth by
+its implacable acts.... What the world awaits from President Wilson is
+not merely a note, it is a verdict. What do neutral peoples, what does
+the American Government, what does President Wilson think of the German
+doctrine,--'Necessity knows no law--the end justifies the means'?...
+Every Government that acts or speaks at the present hour decides the
+nature of the real peace, whether it will be an affirmation of those
+eternal principles that are alone capable of directing humanity toward
+its sacred end."
+
+To our eternal shame as a nation our Government has evaded, up to
+this hour, pronouncing the expected verdict, has preferred to quibble
+and define, in its vain attempt to hold the barbarian to a "strict
+accountability"--whatever that may mean. France does not want our
+army or our navy, not even our money and our factories, except on
+business terms, but she has looked in vain for our affirmation as
+a nation of our belief in her great cause, which should be our own
+cause--the cause of all free peoples.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What a timid and verbal interpretation of neutrality has prevented
+our Government from affirming, the American people, let us be
+thankful, have done generously, abundantly. They have pronounced
+a not uncertain verdict, and they have followed this moral verdict
+with countless acts of sympathy. The cause of France, the faith of
+the French, have roused the chivalry of the best Americans. Our youths
+are fighting in the trenches, our doctors and nurses are giving their
+services, our money is helping to stanch the wounds of France. As
+a people we too have affirmed our faith in the cause and are doing
+generously, spontaneously, as is our wont, what we can to win that
+cause for the world. The splendid hospital of the American Ambulance
+at Neuilly, equipped and operated on the generous American scale,
+is the real monument to the beliefs, the hopes, the faith of the
+American people.
+
+In that modification of the Anglo-Saxon tradition which America is
+fast evolving, there is a subtle sympathy and likeness with the Latin,
+which this crisis has brought into evidence. We are less English than
+French in spirit, in our ideal of culture, of life.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+_The New France_
+
+"This is a return for a new departure!" the Italian poet cried to
+his people at Quarto when they were still hesitating between the
+paths of a prudent neutrality and intervention in the world decision.
+Probably in the poet's thought there was more of concrete ambition
+for "national aspirations" than of spiritual rebirth. But for the
+French nation it is the spiritual rebirth alone that has any meaning.
+No material enlargement of France has ever been seriously contemplated.
+The acquisition of Alsace can hardly be termed conquest, and whatever
+hopes of indemnity or other material advantages the French may have
+permitted themselves to dream of must fade as the financial burden of
+all Europe mounts ever higher. Even the recovery of Alsace, according
+to those best able to judge,--in spite of German assertions,--would
+never have roused France to an aggressive war. Conquest, material
+growth, is not an active principle in the French character. How often
+I have heard this thought on French lips,--"We want to be let alone,
+to be free to live our lives as we think best, to develop our own
+institutions,--that is what we are fighting for!" For forty years
+the nation has lived under the fear of invasion, a black cloud
+always more or less threatening on the frontier, and when the day of
+mobilization came every Frenchman knew instinctively what it meant--the
+long-expected fight for national existence. And the hope that sustains
+the people in their blackest moments is the hope of ending the thing
+forever. "Our children and our children's children will not have to
+endure what we suffer. It will be a better world because of our
+sacrifice."
+
+The conquest that France will achieve is the conquest of herself,
+and the fruits of that she has already attained in a marvelous measure.
+The reality of a new France is felt to-day by every Frenchman and is
+aboundingly obvious to the stranger visiting the country he once knew
+in her soft hours of peace. To be sure, intelligent French people say
+to you, when you comment on the fact, "But we were always really like
+this at bottom, serious and moral and courageous, only you did not see
+the real France." Pardonable pride! The French themselves did not know
+it. As so often with individual souls, it took the fierce fire of
+prolonged trial to evoke the true national character, to bring once
+more to the surface ancient and forgotten racial virtues, to brighten
+qualities that had become dim in the petty occupations of prosperity.
+
+After I had been in France a short time, nothing seemed falser
+to me than the pessimistic assertions of certain German-Americans
+and faint-hearted other Americans, that whatever the outcome of the
+world war France was "done for," "exhausted," "ruined," must sink to
+the level of a third-rate power, and so forth. Nor can I believe the
+words of those saddened sympathizers and helpers in the ambulances
+and hospitals, that "France is proudly bleeding to death." Her wounds
+have been frightful, and through them is still gushing much of the
+best blood of the nation. Her bereavement has been enormous, but not
+irreparable. Once a real peace achieved, the triumph of the cause,
+and I venture to predict that France will give an astonishing
+spectacle of rapid recovery, materially and humanly. For the New
+France is already a fact, not a faith.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Evidence of this rebirth is naturally difficult to make concrete
+as with all spiritual quality. It is not merely the solidarity of
+the nation, the fervent patriotism, the readiness for every sacrifice,
+which are qualities more or less true of all the warring nations,
+especially of Germany. It is more than the perpetual Sunday calm
+along the rue de la Paix, the absence of that parasitic frivolity
+with which Paris--a small part of Paris--entertained the world.
+It is not simply that French people have become serious, silent,
+determined, with set wills to endure and to win--for that moral
+tenacity may relax after the crisis has passed. It is all these
+and much more which I shall try to express that has revealed a
+new France.
+
+To start with some prosaic proofs of the new life, I will take
+the liquor question, a test of social vitality. It is significant
+to examine how the different belligerent nations have treated this
+problem, which becomes acute whenever it is necessary to call upon
+all national reserves in a crisis. Turkey, Italy, and Germany
+apparently have no liquor problem; at least the war has not called
+attention to it. Russia, whose peasantry was notoriously cursed with
+drunkenness, eradicated the evil, ostensibly, by one arbitrary ukase,
+though, if persistent reports from the eastern war region are true,
+her great reform has not yet reached her officers. England has played
+feebly with the question from the beginning when the ravages of drink
+among the working population--what every visitor to England had
+known--became painfully evident to the Government in its efforts
+to mobilize war industries and increase production. Various minor
+restrictions on the liquor traffic have been imposed, but nothing
+that has reached to the roots of the matter--probably because of
+the powerful liquor interest in Parliament as much as from the
+Englishman's fetish of individual liberty. Although the direct
+handicap of drunken workmen did not affect France as it did England,
+the French authorities quickly realized the indirect menace of
+alcoholism and have taken real measures to combat it. Absinthe has
+been abolished. For the army--and that includes practically all the
+younger and abler men--the danger has been minimized by the strict
+enforcement of regulations as to hours and the non-alcoholic nature
+of drinks permitted, which are posted conspicuously in all cafés
+and drinking-places and which are carefully observed, as any one who
+tries to order liquor in company with a man in uniform will quickly
+find out! I never saw a soldier or an officer in the least degree
+under the influence of liquor while I was in France, either at
+the front or outside the military zone, and very few workingmen.
+Not content with the control of liquor in the army, the French have
+seriously attacked the whole problem, which in France centers in the
+right of the fruit-grower to distill brandy,--an ancient custom that
+in certain provinces has resulted in great abuses. Legislation
+against the _bouilleurs de crue_ is one inevitable outcome of the
+awakened sense of social responsibility in France.
+
+Connected with the liquor evil is the birth-rate question, to which
+since the war the attention of all serious-minded people has been
+drawn. The French Academy of Sciences has undertaken an elaborate
+series of investigations into the relations between the birth-rate
+and the consumption of alcohol, which would seem to show that there
+is cause and effect between the excessive use of alcohol and a
+declining birth-rate. This will undoubtedly tend to create a popular
+sentiment favorable to restrictive liquor legislation, specifically
+to abolishing the right to distill spirits. But what is of more real
+significance is the changing sentiment among the French in favor of
+larger families. Due, no doubt, directly to the necessities of a
+draining war, it is also an expression of those deeper experiences
+that trial has brought. The French have always prized family life,
+and French family life is, perhaps, the best type of the social bond
+that the world knows. Under the stress of widespread bereavement the
+French are realizing that the base of the family is not love between
+the sexes, but the existence of children. They want children, not
+only to take the place of their men sacrificed, but as symbols of
+that greater love for the race that the war has evoked. Although
+the crudity of the "war-bride" method of increasing the population
+is not evident in France, every working-girl wears the medallion of
+some "hero" on her breast. Girls say frankly that they want children.
+The Latin will never accept the German principle of indiscriminate
+breeding. As in every other aspect of life, the Latin emphasizes the
+individual, the personal; but an awakened patriotism and pride of
+race, a deepened sense of the real values of life will lead to a
+greater devotion to the family ideal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To shift to the political life of France, the history of the republic
+has been tempestuous in the past. There has been a succession of
+_coups d'état_, plots, and scandals. One political _cause célèbre_
+has followed another--the Boulanger, the Dreyfus, and quite lately
+the Caillaux. The wide publicity which these political scandals have
+had is due partly to the Latin love of excitement, also to the Latin
+frankness about washing dirty political linen in public. To the
+foreigner it has seemed strange that a republic could endure with
+such abysses of intrigue and personal corruption beneath its political
+life as have been shown in the Panama and Dreyfus scandals. The Germans
+probably have been misled by them into considering the French nation
+wholly despicable and degenerate. But France has not only endured in
+spite of these rotten spots, but her republicanism has grown stronger.
+Americans experienced in their own sordid politics should understand
+how uncharacteristic of the real citizenship of a democracy politicians
+can be. The real France has never taken with entire seriousness the
+machinations of "those rats in the Chamber." These "rats" were quite
+active during the first months of the war. Aside from the incompetence
+of the first war ministry, which kept the public in ignorance of the
+danger so completely that the enemy was at Soissons before Paris was
+aware that the French army was being driven back, and all the blunders
+of the raid into Alsace, France had its sinister political menace in
+Joseph Caillaux, who it has been rumored plotted a disgraceful peace
+with Germany before the battle of the Marne. Caillaux, when his
+creature, the grafting paymaster-general, was exposed, found it wise
+to go to South America. An able and on the whole a competent ministry
+was placed in power.
+
+When Caillaux returned last spring, rumors of legislative unrest
+and plotting against the Joffre-Millerand control of the army
+began once more. Outwardly it was an attempt of party leaders in
+the Chamber to gain greater legislative control of the conduct of
+the war, ostensibly for the improvement of bureaucratic methods,
+as in the sanitary service, which was notably deficient. But beneath
+this agitation were the dangerous forces of political France seeking
+to oust Joffre, and there lay the menace that a political clique might
+get control of the army. This agitation, however, did not disturb
+the public. As one Frenchman put it, "If those rats get too active,
+Gallieni will take them out and shoot them. France is behind the
+army, and the people will not tolerate legislative interference with
+it." The political unrest has at last resulted in a new and larger
+cabinet, admittedly the most representative body that France could
+have. The danger of political interference has passed without resort
+to summary methods. It is a triumph of democracy. France will fight
+the war to an end under constitutional government, a much more
+difficult task than Germany's. Obviously, as may be seen in England,
+parliamentary government is a great hindrance to a nation in the
+abnormal state of war. Free societies have this handicap to contend
+with when they fight an autocratic machine. To maintain her republican
+government without scandals throughout the war will be a political
+triumph for France, indicative of the new spirit that has entered
+into the nation. The seriousness of the present situation has sobered
+all men and has suppressed the politicians by the mere weight of
+responsibility. The New France emerging from the trial of war can
+profit by this experience to purge her political life of the
+scandalous elements in it.
+
+Italy has closed her Parliament and relapsed temporarily into autocracy.
+England and France are struggling to maintain popular government as we
+did through the Civil War.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Much has been said of the heroic spirit of the French nation under
+the tragedy of the war. Too much could not be said. The war has
+evoked patriotism among all the peoples engaged, but with the French
+there is a peculiar idealistic passion of tenderness for the _patrie_
+which impresses every observer who has had the good fortune to see
+the nation at war. I shall not linger long on these familiar,
+inspiring aspects of love for country that the war has called forth
+from all classes. The ideal spirit of French youth has been
+illustrated in some letters given to the public by the novelist,
+Henry Bordeaux, called "Two Heroes." They relate the personal
+experiences of two youths, one twenty, the other twenty-one, whose
+baptism of fire came in the battle of the Marne. They grew old fast
+under the ordeal of battle and of responsibility for the lives of
+their men; their letters home show a loftiness of spirit, a sense
+of self-forgetfulness, of devotion to the cause, that is sublime,
+poignant--and typical. In every rank of society the same immense
+devotion, the same utter renouncement of selfish thought can be felt.
+A spirit of ideal sacrifice has spread throughout the nation, making
+France proud, heroic, confident. Such a spirit must be a benediction
+for generations to come.
+
+The common effort, the universal grief, has drawn all French people
+so close together that social and party differences have disappeared.
+The French priest has become once more the heroic leader of his
+people, fighting by their side in the trenches. The scholars, the
+poets, the artists have all done their part,--the nuns, the
+aristocrats, the working-people theirs. While England has been
+harassed with strikes and class recriminations, France has never
+known in her entire history such absolute social harmony and unity,
+such universal and concentrated will.
+
+This spirit of "sacred union" embraces the women who are doing men's
+tasks, the rich who are surrendering their good American securities
+to the Government in exchange for national defense bonds, the poor
+who are bringing their little hordes of gold to the Bank of France to
+swell the gold reserve. I wish that every American might stand in the
+court of the Bank of France and watch that file of women and old men
+depositing their gold--the only absolute security against want they
+have! That is faith made evident, and love.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In looking over the bulky file of French newspapers, illustrated
+weeklies, and pamphlets on the war, which I brought back with me, I
+am struck by the fact that the outstanding characteristic of all this
+comment on the great war from journalist to statesman and publicist
+is not denunciation of the barbarian. Denunciation plays a singularly
+small part in the French reaction to their suffering. References to
+Germans and Germany are usually of a psychological or humorous
+character, illustrating the grotesque and antipathetic aspects in
+which the Teuton presents himself to the Latin mind. That part which
+grieving and denunciation have played in English comment, the gross
+and apoplectic hate of the German press, is taken by lyrical
+enthusiasm for heroism. The newspapers, sure pulse of popular
+appetite, are filled daily with stories of sacrifice, gallantry,
+heroism. This is the aspect of the sordid bloody war that the French
+spirit feeds on. It is a fresh manifestation of an old national
+trait--the love of chivalry. Some day, doubtless, these splendid
+tales of individual heroism, of soldierly and civilian sacrifice,
+will be gathered together to make the laurel wreath of the New
+France. I could fill a volume with those I have read and heard. And I
+like to think that while Germany went wild over the torpedoing of the
+Lusitania,--even dared to celebrate it in America,--while the
+Zeppelin raids arouse her patriotic enthusiasm, the French gloat over
+the story of the private who crawled out of the trench and hunted for
+two days without food or water for his wounded officer. The love of
+the _beau geste_ is an ineradicable trait of French character. It has
+had a bountiful satisfaction in this war.
+
+"We have fought a chivalrous war," General C. exclaimed, pointing to
+the little figure of Jeanne d'Arc. The same general ordered that the
+government dole of a franc and a half a day be paid to those Alsatian
+women whose husbands were fighting in the German army. "They are
+French women: it is not their fault that their husbands are fighting
+against France!" And the deathless touch of all, which will be
+remembered in the world long after the destruction wrought to the
+cathedral of Rheims, is the picture of French saving German wounded
+in the burning church--fired by German shells!
+
+The _beau geste_, the beautiful act, which ennobles all men, not
+merely the doer of the deed,--that is what France is giving the
+world. The image of men who are more than efficient and strong and
+physically courageous, of men who are filled with a divine spirit of
+sacrifice and devotion. Truly supermen.
+
+Chivalry was a trait of the Old France as it is of the New. It
+has fallen somewhat into disrepute of late years with the rise
+of the comfort and efficiency standards. Nowhere else on the broad
+battlefields of Europe has it revived, to redeem the horror of war,
+so shiningly as in the New France.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Another aspect of French character which is both old and new is
+the quality of humorous "sportsmanship" the French have displayed.
+When Germany's crack aviator made a daily visit to Paris, dropping
+bombs, in the afternoon during the early weeks of the war, the
+Parisians took his arrival as a spectacle and thronged the boulevards
+to watch him and applaud. When at last he was shot through the head,
+the French press lamented his loss with genuine appreciation of his
+nerve and his skill. A young cavalry officer at the front told me
+this story: One of the younger officers of his regiment, to encourage
+his men, had offered rewards for German shoulder straps, that is,
+prisoners. Two simple peasants, misunderstanding his words, proudly
+brought in a couple of pairs of German ears strung on a string like
+game. The officer, brooding over the incident, resolved to explain
+and apologize to the enemy. Putting his handkerchief on the point of
+his sword, he crawled out of the trench and advanced across the field
+of death between the lines.
+
+Tales from the trenches by the hundreds prove that the French have
+not lost the sparkle of wit even under the dreary conditions of
+trench-fighting. When Italy joined the Allies, some soldiers of a
+front-line trench hoisted the placard,--"Macaroni mit uns!" Again,
+when boasting placards of German successes in Galicia were displayed,
+the French _poilus_ retorted,--"You lie. You have taken ten thousand
+officers and ten millions of troops." When in a German military
+prison the keepers boasted of their recent successes on the western
+front, the French prisoners began to sing the _Marseillaise_ to the
+astonishment of their German guards, "because," as they explained,
+"we know if you have killed all those French soldiers, you must have
+lost at least four times as many!"
+
+The barbarian misread the Gallic love of wit and laughter. To joke
+and quip seemed to him beneath the dignity of men. It is, rather,
+the safety-valve of a highly intelligent people--the outlet for their
+ironic perceptions of life. The most amusing songs of the war that I
+have heard were given by the _poilus_ on a little stage near Commercy
+while the cannon thundered a few miles away. This ability to turn
+upon himself and see his life in a humorous light is an invaluable
+quality of the French soldier. So, too, is his love of handicraft
+which finds many ingenious expressions even in the trenches. The
+French soldier is always a civilian, with a love of neatly arranged
+gardens and terraces, and he lays out a _potager_ in the curve of a
+shell-swept hillside, or a neat flower garden in the crumbled walls
+of a village house. He makes rings from the aluminum found in German
+shell-caps, carves the doorposts of his stone dugout, or likenesses
+of his officers on beam-ends, as I saw in a colonel's quarters in
+the Bois-le-Prêtre.
+
+The French soldier remains, even in this bloodiest of wars, always
+a civilian, a man, capable of laughter and tears, of heroic heights,
+of chivalrous sacrifices,--with the soul's image of what manhood
+requires, with the vision of a state of free individual men like
+himself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The New France is inspired with qualities of Old France, qualities
+which I call Latin, which have emerged into high relief under grief
+and suffering and effort. It is above all gallant and high-minded.
+The wounded Frenchman never complains or whimpers. "_C'est la
+guerre--que voulez-vous!_" To the surgeon who has operated on
+him,--"_Merci, mon major_." And they lie legless or armless, perhaps
+with running sores, a smile on the face in answer to the sympathetic
+word, in long hospital rows....
+
+The fundamental element in this New France is the gravity, the
+seriousness of it. Of all the warring peoples the French seem to
+realize most clearly what it all means, what it is for, and the deep
+import of the decision not merely to them, but to the whole world.
+They are fighting, not for territory, but for principles. Peace must
+be not a rearrangement of maps, but of men's ideas, of men's wills.
+They are the conscious protagonists of a long tradition of ideals
+that have once more been put in jeopardy. It is the character of this
+human world of ours which they are struggling to mould, and like
+actors in a Greek tragedy they are suitably impressed with the
+gravity of the issue in their hands.
+
+The New France has been born in the travail of the monstrous
+desolation of trench-land that stretches, scabby with shell-holes,
+leprous with gray wire, pitted with countless graves, scarred with
+crumbled villages for four hundred miles across the fair fields of
+_la douce France_. In this savage desert, inhumanly silent except
+for the shrieking of shells, for now more than a year's time France
+has struggled with the incarnated spirit of evil, rearing its head
+again, armed with all the enginery of modern science. The little,
+dirty-bearded soldiers squat there in their burrows, white-faced,
+tense, silent, waiting, watching, month after month, or plunge over
+their walls to give their lives on that death-field outside. They are
+the simple martyrs of the New France.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+France has learned her German lesson; has reorganized her life to
+make it tell effectively for her task, has reorganized her inner
+life, discarding frivolity and waste. She has found herself in the
+fire. France is not "done for," as my German-American friends so
+pityingly deem. Bleeding from her terrible wounds, she is stronger
+today than ever before,--stronger in will, in spirit, in courage, the
+things that count in the long, long run even in the winning of wars.
+Technically minded soldiers may judge that "Germany can't be beaten."
+But the French know in their souls that she can be, that she is beaten
+today! In this greatest of world's decisions it is the spirit of the
+Latin that triumphs again--the sanest, suavest, noblest tradition that
+the earth has ever known, under which men may work out their mysterious
+destiny.
+
+
+
+
+Part Three--America
+
+
+I
+
+
+_What Does It Mean to Us?_
+
+I went from the French front back to America. The steamer slipped
+down the Gironde between green vineyards, past peaceful villages,
+a whole universe distant from that grim, gray trench-land where the
+French army was holding the invader in Titan grip, stole cautiously
+into the Bay of Biscay at nightfall to escape prowling submarines,
+and began to roll in the Atlantic surges, part of those "three
+thousand miles of cool sea-water" on which our President so complacently
+relies as a nonconductor of warfare. I was homeward bound to America,
+the land of Peace, after four months spent in "war-ridden Europe"--to
+that homeland stranger somehow than the war lands, where my countrymen
+were protesting to both belligerents and making money, manufacturing
+war supplies and blowing up factories, talking "peace" and "preparedness"
+in the same breath; also--and God be thanked for that!--helping to feed
+the starving Belgians, sending men, money, and sympathy to the French.
+As the old steamer settled into her fourteen-knot gait, the submarines
+ceased to be of more than conversational concern, and I began to ask
+myself,--"What does it all mean to us, this bloody sacrifice of world
+war,--to us, strong, rich, peaceful, confident Americans?"
+
+For in spite of a curious indifference among many Americans to the
+outcome, so long as it did not get us into trouble with either party,
+betrayed by personal letters and press articles which I had received,
+I was profoundly convinced that the issues of the world tragedy were
+momentous to us too. "This European butchery means nothing," said one
+friend, who supplies editorial comment for a most widely read American
+weekly, "except a lot of poverty, a lot of cripples, and a lot of
+sodden hate in the hearts of the people engaged. Europe will not be
+changed appreciably as a result of the war!" Our pacifist ex-Secretary
+of State, I remember, wrote Baron d'Estournelles de Constant inquiring
+what the French were fighting for, implying that to the reasonable
+onlooker there was no clear issue involved in the whole business,
+merely the passions of misguided patriotism. The well-meaning agitation
+for peace, which as I write has been lifted into the grotesque by the
+Ford peace ship, is based largely on this inability to realize the
+reality of the issue between the belligerents. And there is our national
+attitude of strict neutrality, which fairly represents the evasive mind
+of many Americans. Happily, they seem to say to themselves, "This war is
+not our affair." We were warned by Washington to keep clear of European
+"quarrels," and wisely we covered our retreat at The Hague by inserting
+that little clause which relieved us from all real responsibility for
+the observance of the conventions. Excuse for cowardice and blindness
+of vision! Such Americans like to think that as a nation we have no more
+concern in the present war than a peaceable family in one house has with
+the domestic upheavals of an unfortunate family in the next house. The
+part of prudence is to ignore all evidences of unpleasantness, to profess
+good offices, and to keep on friendly terms with all the belligerents.
+
+The impression that such an attitude makes on the American in
+Europe is painful, whether it be expressed in personal letters,
+in newspapers and magazines, or in diplomatic "notes." He becomes
+impatient with the provincialism of his own people, ashamed of their
+transparent selfishness, astonished that human values should have got
+so fatally distorted in our fat, comfortable world. To the European,
+American neutrality has become a matter of public indifference, of
+private contempt. Inspired with the lofty ambition of playing the
+rôle of mediator in the world war, President Wilson has lost his
+chance of influencing the decision toward which Europe is bloodily
+fighting its way. At that great peace conference which every European
+has perpetually in mind, America will be ignored. Only those who have
+shared the bloody sacrifice--at least have had the courage to declare
+their beliefs--will penetrate its inner councils. We have had our
+reward--money and safety. It is not fantastic even to expect that the
+conquerors might under certain circumstances say to the conquered,
+"Take your losses from the Americans: they alone have made money out
+of our common woe!"
+
+No, ours has not been the _beau geste_ as a nation. Nor can the
+American take comfort in the thought that Washington diplomacy does
+not fairly represent the sentiment of our people. As the weeks slip
+past, it is only too evident that our President has interpreted
+exactly the national will. The farther west one travels the colder
+is the American heart, and duller the American vision. The numerical
+center of the United States is somewhere in the Mississippi Valley.
+Europe gave Chicago, in her distress after the great fire, eighty
+cents per person; Chicago has given Belgium and France seven cents
+per Chicagoan. Not a single Chicago bank appears on the list of
+subscribers to the Anglo-French loan,--very few banks anywhere west
+of the Alleghanies. "It is not our quarrel; we are not concerned
+except to get our money for the goods we sell them!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But are we not concerned? I asked myself as the old steamer throbbed
+wheezily westward. Beneath the deck in the ship's strong room there
+were thick bundles of American bonds, millions of them, part of the
+big American mortgage that Europe has been obliged to sell back to
+us. They represent European savings, hopes of tranquil old age, girls'
+_dots_, boys' education and start in life. The American mortgage is
+being lifted rapidly. The stocks and bonds were going home to pay for
+the heavy cargoes of foodstuffs and ammunition and clothes which we
+had been shipping to Europe. The savings of the thrifty French were
+going to us, who were too rich already. The French were bleeding their
+thrift into our bulging pockets, selling their investments for shells
+and guns and barbed wire which would not keep old age warm, marry their
+girls, or start their boys in life. They were doing it freely, proudly,
+for the salvation of their _patrie_, which they love as the supreme
+part of themselves. And to us what did all this sacrifice mean? Oh,
+that we were growing richer day by day while the war lasted; "dollar
+exchange" was coming nearer; we were fast getting "rotten with money,"
+as a genial young coal merchant who had the deck chair next mine
+remarked affably. Yes, the war meant that to us surely,--we were fast
+raking in most of the gold that Europe has been forced to throw on the
+table of international finance, the savings, the _dots_, the stakes of
+her next generation. The number of lean-faced American business men,
+war brokers, on the steamer was plain evidence of that. Already
+Prosperity was flooding into America--that prosperity upon which our
+President congratulated the country in his Thanksgiving address.
+
+But is that prosperity a good thing for the American people just
+now? Aside from the speculation excited by the superabundance of gold
+in our banks, there is the envy of hungry Europe to be reckoned with
+a few months or years hence, after the close of the great war, an envy
+that might readily be translated into predatory action under certain
+circumstances, as some thoughtful Americans are beginning to perceive.
+Eastern America, where the war money has largely settled, is already
+fearful, desires to arm the nation to protect its prosperity. And
+there is the more subtle, the more profound danger that this undigested
+war bloat of ours will dull the American vision still further to the
+real issue at stake--the kind of world we are willing, the kind of soul
+we wish, to possess. Can we safely digest the prosperity that the happy
+accident of our temporary isolation and the prudent policies of our
+Government have given us? Are we not feeding a cancer that will take
+another war to cut from our vitals?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Most of us on board were Americans going about our businesses on a
+belligerent nation's ship in defiance of Mr. Bryan's advice. The man
+next to me was building a new munitions plant for France, and beyond
+him was the European manager for a large American corporation whose
+factories have been taken over by the German Government. He was
+returning to America to enter the munitions business in Pittsburg
+or Connecticut. To these commercial travelers of war the European
+struggle meant, naturally, first of all money, the opportunity of a
+lifetime to make money quickly; it meant also less vividly helping
+the Allies, who needed everything they could get from us and were
+willing to pay almost any price for it. Sometimes they talked of the
+long list of "accidents" that were happening daily in American factories
+and genially cursed the hyphenated Germans. As for the other sort of
+Germans they felt vaguely that some day America must reckon with them,
+too. Evidently they put small faith in the "three thousand miles of
+cool sea-water" as a nonconductor of warfare! So here was another
+aspect of the war--the possible dangers to us, without a friend in
+the world, as every one agreed. And we talked "preparedness" in the
+usual desultory way. The munitions men seemed to think that they were
+patriotically working for their own country in getting "the plant" of
+war into being. "Some day we shall need guns and shells too!" Afterwards
+I found in America that this vague fear of probable enemies had seized
+hold of the country quite generally, and that the very Government which
+had done nothing toward settling the present war rightly was planning
+for "defense" with a prodigal hand. Peaceful America was getting
+alarmed--of what?
+
+There were also in our number some young doctors and nurses who were
+returning from the hospitals in France for a little needed rest. They
+were of those young Americans who are giving themselves so generously
+for the cause, eager, courageous, sympathetic. They seemed to me to
+have gotten most from the war of all us Americans, much more than the
+munitions men who were making money so fast. In Belgium, in Serbia,
+behind the French lines, in the great hospital at Neuilly, they had
+got comprehension and all the priceless rewards of pure giving. They
+had seen horror, suffering, and waste indescribable; but they had
+seen heroism and devotion and chivalry. And with them should be joined
+all the tender-hearted and generous Americans at home who have aided
+their efforts, who are working with the energy of the American character
+"for the cause." Alas, already the word was coming of a relaxation in
+the generosities, the devotions, the enthusiasms of these Americans.
+Other interests were coming into our rapid activities to distract us
+from last year's sympathies....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So as we rolled on through the soft summer night while the passengers
+discussed the latest Russian reverse of which news had been received
+by wireless, I kept asking myself,--"What does it really mean to us?
+To vast, rich, young America?" Surely not merely more money, more
+power, even a loftier inspiration for the few who have given themselves
+generously in sympathy and aid. After all, these were but incidental.
+The threat we were beginning to feel to our own security, this campaign
+for "preparedness," did not seem of prime, moving importance. Probably
+in our bewildered state of mind we should wrangle politically about the
+matter of how much defense we needed, then drop some more hundreds of
+millions into the bottomless pit of governmental extravagance and waste.
+We had already spent enough to equip another Germany! When peace was
+finally made in Europe, we would forget our fears; our Congressmen and
+their parasites would fatten on the new appropriations, which would be
+as actually futile as all their predecessors had been. No; these were
+hardly the significant aspects of the war to us as a people.
+
+No more was that acrobatic exhibition of diplomatic tight-rope
+walking we had witnessed from Washington. Mere "words, words, words,
+professor!" Our dialectic President had thus far failed to establish
+any one of his contentions, either with Germany or Great Britain, nor
+did it seem likely that he ever could. While he was still modifying
+that awkward phrase, "strict accountability," Germany obviously would
+murder whomsoever it suited her purpose to murder, and England would
+hold up any ship that attempted to trade with Germany. All those
+neutral rights for which Washington was paying big cable tolls had
+not been advanced an atom. The time had gone by when our strong voice
+could compel respect from the barbarian, could hearten the soul of
+other weaker neutrals. Europe had taken our exact measure. We should
+have saved some dignity had we not murmured more than a formal
+protest....
+
+And yet, returning from "war-ridden Europe" I was more convinced
+than of anything else in life that what was being slowly settled
+in that grim trench--land over there did mean something to us--more,
+much more than money or neutral rights or sympathetic charities. Not
+that I was apprehensive of an immediate German raid on New York, the
+crumbling of her sky-scrapers and the exaction of colossal indemnities.
+For it looked to me that Germany might well have other occupation
+after peace was made in Europe, whichever way the war should go. The
+German peril did not lie, I thought, in her big guns, her ships, her
+"Prussianized machine." It lay deeper, in herself, in her image of
+the world. If Germany could win even a partial victory under that
+monstrous creed of applied materialism, illuminated as it had been
+with every sort of cynical crime, with its reasoned defiance of contract,
+its principle of "indispensable severities," its "military reasons,"
+_that_ must become inexorably the law of the world--the barbarians'
+law. Germany would have made the morality of the world! And of all
+the world's peoples to accept the victor's new reading of the
+commandments, proud America would be the first. For we cannot resist
+the fascination of success. The German aim, the German tyranny over
+the individual, the German morality--one for you and me as individuals
+and another utterly lawless one when we get together in a social
+state--would be imitated more than the German lesson of thoroughness
+in civil and military organization. Hypnotized by German success, we
+should not discipline ourselves, which is the German lesson, so much
+as we should riot in the moral license of the German creed. Americans
+would worship at the altar of that queer "old German god," who
+apparently encourages rape, murder, arson, and tyranny in his followers.
+For in young America, with every social tradition in it seething blood,
+there is already an insidious tendency to accept this new-old religion
+of triumphant force. American "Big Business" can understand the Kaiser's
+philosophy, can reverence his "old German god" when he brings victory,
+more than any other people outside of Germany. For it, too, believes
+in "putting things over" with a strong hand. There is not an argument
+of the German militarist propaganda that would not find a sympathetic
+echo somewhere in the headquarters of American corporations.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the old fourteen-knot steamer finally dropped anchor off
+quarantine in New York Harbor and the reporters came on board with
+the dust of America on their shoes, the roar of America in their
+voices, I was surer than ever that this greatest of world wars meant
+a vast deal more to us than trade or charity or politics, which is
+what we seem to be making of it for the most part. It means the form
+which our national character is to take ultimately. The German peril,
+which is held before the public in moving pictures and in alarmist
+appeals for "preparedness," is already in our midst, not so much at
+work blowing up our factories as insidiously at work in our hearts.
+The German apologist--even of Anglo-Saxon blood--is suggesting the
+reasonableness of a German verdict. "After all," one hears from his
+lips, "there is much on the other side of the shield, which our
+English prejudices have prevented us from seeing. Germany cannot be
+the monster of barbarism that she has been painted. As for broken
+treaties, the atrocities, the submarines, the murder of Edith Cavell,
+and her rough work over here,--well, we must remember it is war, and
+the Russian Cossacks have not been saints!... As to her military
+autocracy, perhaps a little of it would not be a bad thing for
+America. At any rate, Germany seems to have the power--it is useless
+to think of putting her down.... The American public will forget all
+about German crimes once Germany is victorious." "Nothing succeeds
+like success." "There is always a reason for success," etc. Which
+cynical acceptance proves that we have already "committed adultery in
+our hearts."
+
+There are many voices in the air, too many. Americans have not yet
+found themselves in this crisis of world tragedy, and the Government
+at Washington has not helped them to an understanding. We are vastly
+relieved at not finding ourselves "involved" and accept shabby verbal
+subterfuges as a triumph of American diplomacy. Meanwhile the Lusitania
+incident has been conveniently forgotten, with the awkward phrase
+"strictly accountable." Along the eastern seaboard the anxious and the
+timid are clamoring for "defense"--against what? The talkative pacifists,
+who would make a grotesque farce of the bloody sacrifice by a futile
+peace, are bringing further ridicule and contempt on their country
+with their impertinent if well-meant efforts. Meantime, the money-makers
+have taken this occasion to stage a spectacular bull market, grumbling
+on the fruits of war! And there is the "good-time" side to American life.
+For a few brief months after the outbreak of the war Americans were
+staggered by the awfulness of the tragedy and moved under its shadow.
+Their hearts went out in sympathy, in feeding the dispossessed, and
+sending aid to the wounded. We spent less on ourselves, partly because
+of financial fear, partly because of our desire to give, partly because
+our hearts were too heavy to play. But already that serious mood is
+passing, and to-day as a people we are hard at it again, chasing a good
+time. We feel once more the same old lustful urge to get and enjoy....
+The other night as I looked out on the peopled sea of the New York
+opera-house, with its women richly dressed and jeweled, its white-faced
+men, leading the same life of easy prodigal expense, of sensual
+gratification, I remembered another opera staged in the mysterious
+twilight of Bayreuth where from the gloom emerged the hoarse bass of
+Fafner's cry,--"I lie here possessing!" The voice of the great worm
+proved to be the voice of Germany. Is it ours also?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Do we Americans desire to have our world Germanized? Not in art and
+language and customs, though may Heaven preserve us from that fate
+also! But Germanized in soul? Do we want the German image or the Latin
+image of the world to prevail? And are we strong enough in our own
+ideal to resist a "peaceful penetration" by triumphant Germany into
+our minds and hearts? That is the urgent matter for us. No amount
+spent on big guns, superdreadnoughts, submarines, and continental
+guards--no amount of peace talk--can keep the German peril out of
+America if we surrender our souls to her creed, now that Germany
+seems to be imposing it successfully with her armies in Europe. Those
+dirty _poilus_ in the front trenches are, indeed, fighting our battle
+for us, if we did but know it!
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+_The Choice_
+
+"We have all sinned, your people as well as mine, the English,
+the French, the Germans, all, all of us,--but Germany has sinned
+most." When M. Hanotaux spoke these words with a Hebraic fervor of
+conviction, I did not have to be told what he meant. The people of
+our time have sinned through their hot desire for material possession
+of the earth and its riches--through commercialism, capitalism, call
+it what you will. Each great nation has made its selfish race for
+economic advancement at the expense of other peoples: commercial
+rivalry has largely begotten this bloody war, which is essentially
+a predatory raid by one barbarous tribe against the riches of its
+neighbors. Whether England or Russia under similar circumstances
+would have dared a similar attack on the liberties of the world is
+open to speculation. To Germany alone, however, has been reserved the
+distinction of elevating greed and the lust of power to the dignity
+of a philosophic system, a creed with the religious sanction of that
+"old German god" to smite the rivals of the Fatherland and take away
+their wealth. It is because Germany has made a consistent monster out
+of her materialistic interpretation of modern science that she is now
+held up before the nations of the world as a spectacle and a warning.
+"We have all sinned" in believing that the body is more than the
+spirit, that food and pleasure and power are the primary ends of all
+living; but Germany alone has had the effrontery to justify her
+cynicism by conscious theory and to teach it systematically to all
+her people. She has endowed with life a philosophical idea, given it
+the personality of her people, created a national Frankenstein to be
+feared and loathed. More, she is coming perilously nigh to imposing
+her god upon the world!
+
+We have all worshiped at the shrine of material achievement--in
+America with the riot of young strength. England, like old King
+Amfortas, is now bleeding from the sins of her youth and calling in
+vain for some Parsifal to deliver her from their penalty. She has
+built her rich civilization on a morass of exploited millions, and
+her Nemesis is that in her hour of peril her sodden millions strike
+and drink and feel no imperative urge to give their lives for an
+England that sucked her prosperity from their veins. In the race for
+commercial supremacy the Latin nations--Italy, Spain, and France--have
+been deemed inferior to Germany, England, and the United States,
+because they were less tainted with the lust of possession, less
+materialistic in their reading of life, less powerful in their grasp
+upon economic opportunity than their rivals. In the Latin countries
+industry yet remains largely on the small scale, which is economically
+wasteful, but which does not build up fabulous wealth at the expense
+of the individual worker. The great corporation designed for the rapid
+creation of wealth has not found that congenial home on Latin soil
+which it has on ours, or on German soil. And this fact accounts for
+the touch of handicraft lingering in the product of Latin industry,
+for the strength and health individually of their working classes,
+for their fervor of devotion to the national tradition. The Latin
+has never forgotten the claims of the individual life: democracy to
+him is more than the right to vote. Therefore, pure art, pure science,
+pure literature--also the world of ideas--has a larger part in the life
+of Latin peoples than with us in the eternal struggle with the
+materialistic forces of life. To the Latin living is not solely the
+gratification of the body. He reckons on the intelligence and the
+spirit of man as well.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may seem to some that throughout these pages I have spoken
+paradoxically of the world war as primarily a struggle between the
+Latin and the Germanic ideal, ignoring the significance of Russia
+and of England. In spite of the heroic resistance of the French and
+the pertinacious thrust of the Italians against the steel wall in
+which Austria has bound them, the Latin forces engaged are obviously
+less than half of the Allied Powers. On the sea England is virtually
+alone. Nevertheless, I see the struggle as a Latin-German one, the
+great decision as essentially a decision between these two types of
+ideals. All else is relative and accidental. Apart from the
+surprising vitality developed by the two Latin peoples, their
+astonishing force in the brutal struggle for survival,--which has
+disagreeably put wrong the calculations of their enemy,--it is the
+mental and spiritual leadership of the world which is being fought
+for rather than the physical. The ideas and the ideals under which
+the Allies are fighting, which can be simply summed up however
+divergent their manifestations, are French, are Latin ideas and
+ideals, not English, not Russian. The spirit of the cause to which
+England has lent her imperial supremacy and Russia her undeveloped
+strength is Latin, and since the war began the English have widely
+borne testimony to this fact.
+
+The right of peoples, little as well as strong nations, to live their
+own lives, to preserve their own political autonomy, to develop their
+own traditions, is part of the Latin lesson learned in the throes of
+the great Revolution. It is expressed passionately, wistfully in that
+universal cry of the French people: "We must end this thing--it must
+never happen again--we must win the right to live as we see fit, not
+under the dictation of another!" To the Latin mind the world is
+peopled by individuals who cannot and should not be pressed in the
+same political or economic mould, who must win their individual
+salvation by an individual struggle and evolution. This is the ideal
+of liberty the world over, which prompted France to send us help in
+our struggle with England. It is a wasteful, an uneconomic ideal, as
+we Americans have proved in our slovenly administration of our great
+inheritance. Yet we would not have a machine-made, autocratic
+organization, no matter how clean and thrifty and efficient it might
+make our cities. We prefer the slow process of conversion to the
+machine process of coercion. And that is one source of our sympathy
+with French civilization. Let us have all liberty to its possible
+limit short of license: the Latin intelligence has known how to
+preserve liberty from becoming license. The result in the human being
+of the principle of liberty is individual intelligence and spiritual
+power; those are the high ideals toward which democracy aims. The
+cost of them is efficiency, organization--immediate results which
+German discipline obtains. But the cost of the German ideal is the
+humanity of life, and that is too big a price to pay. That there
+should be found many among us who are willing to exchange the
+spiritual flower of our civilization for the sake of a more efficient
+social organization is evidence of the extent to which the cancer of
+a materialistic commercialism has already eaten into our life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Latin vision of life includes chivalry, as has been abundantly
+revealed by the spirit of the French, sorely tried in their struggle
+with the new barbarian. Chivalry means beauty of conduct, an
+uneconomic, a sentimental ideal, but without which the life of man on
+this earth would be forlorn, lacking in dignity, in meaning. Take
+from mankind the shadowy dream of himself implied in his desire for a
+chivalrous world, and you leave him a naked animal from the jungle,
+more despicable the more skillful he becomes in gratifying his lusts.
+The Latin vision of life includes also beauty of art, man's radiation
+of his inner spiritual world, and closely woven with the love of art
+is respect for tradition--reverence for the past which has been
+bequeathed to him by his ancestors, which is incorporated in his
+blood.
+
+We in America have striven for these beauties of chivalry, art, and
+tradition. We have striven to put them into our lives often blindly,
+crudely. We have borrowed and bought what we could not create;
+instinctively we pay homage to what is beyond our industrial power
+to make, confessing the inadequacy of our materialism to satisfy our
+souls. We, too, demand a world in which beauty of conduct, beauty of
+manners, and beauty of art shall be cultivated to give meaning to our
+lives. The bombardment of Rheims, the murder of Edith Cavell are as
+shameful to the American mind as to the French, and as incomprehensible.
+These are not matters of reason, but of instinct--commands of the soul.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Latin ideal is not predatory. Whatever they may have done in
+their past, the Latin peoples to-day are not greedy of conquest. If
+the Allies win, France will gain little territory. Both Italy and
+France have limited their territorial ambitions to securing their
+future safety by establishing frontiers on natural barriers. France
+also expects indemnity for her huge losses and for outraged Belgium.
+She must rebuild her home and be freed for generations to come from
+the inhibiting fear of invasion. One does not feel so confident of
+England: in the past she has had the pilfering hand. But from
+prudence if not from shame England may content herself with a
+reestablished prestige and a tranquil Europe. Russia has already
+reconciled herself to relinquishing Poland, and except for her
+natural ambition to enter the Mediterranean she seems without
+predatory desires. Russia, it should not be forgotten, took up arms
+to protect her own kin from the Austrians. The Slav and the Latin
+have a spiritual sympathy that cannot exist between the Latin and the
+Teuton, which gives their present union more than an accidental
+significance.
+
+Whatever secret ambitions may be brewing in the chancelleries of
+Europe, France has put herself on record against conquest too
+emphatically to countenance at the peace conference any predatory
+rearrangement of the map of Europe. She has made the great war a
+struggle of principle--the principle of national liberty against the
+principle of military conquest. It is this great principle which
+gives significance to her cause and justifies the awful slaughter and
+waste of bleeding Europe. If the pretensions of physical might, no
+matter with what excuses, can be thoroughly defeated, proved to be an
+impossible theory of life, so that never again in the history of the
+world will a nation attempt to take with the sword what does not
+belong to it, the bloody sacrifice will have been well worth making.
+The issues of the great conflict have been obscured, especially in
+America, but to the humblest soldier of France they are as clear as
+blazing sunlight. "Never again!" Never the monstrous pretension that
+power alone makes right, that the will to eat gives free license to
+the eater, however great his appetite or his belief in himself. That
+is the cause of all the world, for which the French are willing to
+give all that they have. And I know no cause more important to be
+settled for the future of the human race.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Are we not interested in the right decision of this cause? A
+peaceable people, loving our own way, jealous of interference,
+we should assuredly present a lamentable spectacle were we called
+upon to defend ourselves against a predatory enemy. Possibly a more
+lamentable spectacle of inefficiency combined with corruption than
+England has given the world the past year! And at last we are becoming
+aware that our policy of selfish isolation does not mean immunity from
+attack. We are realizing that those "three thousand miles of cool
+sea-water" no longer make an effectual barrier against the ingenuity
+of modern men.
+
+But I would not put the matter on the selfish basis of our own
+security. It is vastly larger than that. It is, vitally, what
+manner of world we wish to have for ourselves and our children.
+At the invasion of Belgium, America gave with splendid unanimity
+the response: Americans did not want the German world! Since then,
+alas, it would seem that the clear moral reaction of our people to
+the demonstration of the world struggle has been gradually weakening:
+we are becoming confused, permitting insidious reasoners to cloud the
+issue, listening to the prompting of the beast in our own bellies,
+hesitating, dividing, excusing, evading the great question--"seeing
+both sides." As if there were two sides to such a plain issue stripped
+of all its fallacies and subterfuges and lies! Do we wish to have
+American life take on the moral and intellectual and artistic color
+of German ideals? Do we prefer the "old German god" to the culture
+and humanities we have inherited from the Latin tradition?... "We,
+too, have sinned." In our blood is all the crude materialism of a
+triumphant Germany without her discipline and her organization. We,
+too, are ready to enter the fierce war of commercial rivalry with
+England and Germany. We, too, believe in the good of economic expansion,
+though dubious about our own imperialism. Surely no people that ever
+lived stood hesitating so dangerously at the crossroads as America at
+this hour. Prudence has prevented us as a nation from pronouncing
+that moral verdict on the cause which might have had decisive weight
+in hastening the world decision. But a selfish timidity cannot prevent
+us individually from realizing the immense importance to us of the
+decision that is being ground out in the tears and blood of Europe.
+And no ideal of diplomatic neutrality can prevent Americans who care
+for anything but their own selfish well-being from doing all in their
+power to make ours a Latin rather than a Teutonic world.
+
+Every soldier who dies in the trenches of France, who bears a maimed
+and disfigured body through life, is giving himself for us, so that
+we may live in a world where individual rights and liberties are
+respected, where beauty of conduct and beauty of art may endure,
+where life means more than the satisfaction of bodily appetites.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+_Peace_
+
+The real cynics of the war are the pacifists. They see nothing more
+serious in the European agony than what can be disposed of easily at
+any time in a peace conference--by talk and adjustment. So obsessed
+are some of them by the slaughter of men, by the woe and travail of
+Europe, that they would turn the immense sacrifice into a grotesque
+farce by any sort of compromise--a peace that could be no peace,
+merely the armistice for further war. Their eyes are so blinded by
+the economic waste of the war and its suffering that they are incapable
+of seeing the great underlying principle that must be decided. Americans,
+having evaded the responsibility of pronouncing a decisive moral
+judgment on the rape of Belgium, the sinking of the Lusitania, and
+the extermination of the Armenians, play the buffoon with women's
+peace conferences, peace ships, and endless impertinent peace talk.
+We, who have forfeited our right to sit at the peace conference, who
+are busily making money off the war, having prudently kept our own
+skins out of danger, are officiously ready with proposals of peace.
+What a peace! The only peace that could be made to-day would be a
+dastardly treason to every one of the millions whose blood has watered
+Europe, to every woman who has given a son or a father or a husband
+to the settlement of the cause. The parochialism of the American
+intelligence has never been more humiliatingly displayed than in
+the activities of our busy peacemakers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No sane person believes in war. The sordidness and the horror of war
+have never been so fully revealed as during this past year. War has
+been stripped of its every romantic feature. Modern war is worse than
+hell--it is pure insanity. We do not need peace foundations, peace
+conferences, peace ships to demonstrate the awfulness of war. But
+crying peace, thinking peace, willing peace will not bring peace
+unless conditions that make peace exist. Here in America we use the
+word peace too loosely, as if it meant some absolute state of being
+which we had achieved through our innate wisdom rather than from the
+happy accident of our world position. But peace is an entirely
+relative term, as any one who has given heed to the social conditions
+we have created should realize. We have enjoyed a certain kind of
+peace, the value of which is debatable. And now, alarmed at the
+exposed condition of our eastern seaboard, we are agitatedly
+preparing to arm to protect ourselves--from what? From Germany? Or is
+it from England? And still we recommend an instant peace to Europe!
+
+Awful as are the waste and suffering caused by war, hideous as modern
+warfare is, there are worse evils for humanity. To my thinking the
+perpetuation of the lawless, materialistic creed of the new Germany
+would be infinitely worse for the world than any war could be. When
+the German tide broke into Belgium and poured out over northern
+France, sweeping all before it, killing, burning, raping, the
+pacifists no doubt would have accepted the conqueror as the will of
+God and have made peace then!... There are none more eager for peace
+than the soldiers in the trenches who are giving their lives to press
+back the barbarian flood. But no peace until their "work has been
+done, the cause won." I have heard Americans express the fear that
+European civilization is in danger of annihilation from the prolonged
+conflict. Even that were preferable to submission to the wrong ideal.
+But I see, rather, the possibility of a higher civilization through
+the settlement of fundamental principles, the reaffirmation of
+necessary laws. It is surely with this abiding faith that the
+enormous sacrifices are being freely made by the allied nations. "It
+is of little importance what happens to us," a Frenchman said to me
+in Rheims, whose home had been destroyed that morning, whose son had
+already been killed in the trenches. "There will be a better world
+for the generations to come because of what we have endured." That is
+what the American pacifist cannot seem to understand--the necessity
+of present sacrifice for a better future, the cost in blood and agony
+of ultimate principles.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This war is leading us all back to the basic commonplaces of
+thinking. Is life under any and all conditions worth the having? Our
+reason says not. It tells us that the diseased and the weak-minded
+should not be permitted to breed, that an anaemic existence under
+degenerating influences is not worth calling life. We shudder in our
+armchairs at the thought of "cannon food," but why not shudder
+equally at the words "factory food," "mine food," and "sweat-shop
+food"? We are inclined to sentimentalize over those brave lives that
+have been spent by the hundreds of thousands on the battlefields of
+France and Poland, but for the most part we live placidly unconscious
+of the lives ground out in industrial competition all about us.
+Between the two methods of eating up, of maiming, of suppressing
+human lives, the battle method may be the more humane--I should
+prefer it for myself, for my child. What our pacifists desire is not
+so much peace as bloodlessness. We should be honest enough to
+recognize that for many human beings,--possibly a majority even in
+our prosperous, war-free society,--a violent death may not be by any
+means the worst event. And it may be the happiest if the individual
+is convinced that the sacrifice of his existence will help others to
+realize a better life. That is the hope, the faith of every loyal
+soldier who dies for his country, of every soldier's father and
+mother who pays with a son for the endurance of those ideals more
+precious than life itself.
+
+The higher one rises in consciousness, the more nearly free and
+self-determined life becomes, the greater are the rewards of complete
+sacrifice. There are many who have "fallen on the field of honor"
+whose lives, if lived out under normal peace conditions, might have
+meant much to themselves, possibly to humanity. They have given
+themselves freely, without question, for what seems to them of more
+importance than life. Wounded, mutilated past all usefulness, dying,
+they have not rebelled. Doctors and nurses in the hospitals tell the
+story of their endurance without complaint of their bitter fate. Much
+as we must feel the awful price which they have felt obliged to pay,
+it is not sentimental to say that the finer spirits among them have
+lived more fully in the few crowded weeks of their struggle than if
+they had been permitted to live out their lives in all the
+gratifications of our comfortable civilization. Letters from them
+give an extraordinary revelation of priceless qualities gained by
+these soldiers through complete renunciation and sacrifice. War, it
+must not be denied, is a great developer as well as a destroyer of
+life. Nothing else, it would seem, in our present state of evolution
+presses the cup of human experience so full of realization and
+understanding as battle and death. The men who are paying for their
+beliefs with their lives are living more in moments and hours than we
+who escape the ordeal can ever live. For life cannot be measured by
+time or comfort or enjoyment. It is too subtle for that! A supreme
+effort, even a supreme agony, may have more real living worth than
+years of "normal" existence. The youths whose graves now dot so
+plentifully the pleasant fields of France have drunk deeper than we
+can fathom of the mystery of life.
+
+As for the nation, that greater mother for whose existence they have
+given their individual lives, there is even less question of the
+benefit of this war. We Americans are fond of measuring loss and gain
+in figures: we reckon up the huge war debts, the toll of killed and
+wounded, and against this heavy account we set down--nothing. It is
+all dead loss. Yet even to-day, in the crisis of their struggle,
+there is not a Frenchman who will not admit the immense good that has
+already come to his people, that will come increasingly out of the
+bloody sacrifice. The war has united all individuals, swept aside the
+trivial and the base, revealed the nation to itself. The French have
+discovered within their souls and shown before the world qualities,
+unsuspected or forgotten, of chivalry, steadfastness, seriousness,
+and they have renewed their familiar virtues of bravery and good
+humor and intelligence. The French soldier, the French citizen, and
+the French woman are to-day marvelously moulded in the heroic type
+of their best tradition: in the full sense of the word they are
+gallant--chivalrous, self-forgetful, devoted. Is there any price
+too great to pay for such a resurrection of human nobility?
+
+The pacifist is fain to babble of the "disciplines of peace." No
+one denies them. But how can humanity be compelled to embrace these
+disciplines of peace? The German lesson of thoroughness and social
+organization and responsibility was as necessary before the war as it
+is to-day, but neither England nor France, neither Russia nor our own
+America gave heed to it until the terrible menace of extermination
+in this war ground the lesson into their unwilling souls. It may be
+lamentable that humanity should still be held so firmly in the grip
+of biologic law that it must kill and be killed in order to save
+itself, but there are things worse than death. Until humanity learns
+the secret of self-discipline it will create diseases that can be
+eradicated only with the knife; it is merely blind to assume that
+the insanity of war can be prevented by any system of parliamenting,
+or litigation, or paper schemes of international arbitration. Some
+issues are of a primary importance, unarguable, fundamental. No
+man--and no nation--is worthy of life who is not ready to lay it down
+in their settlement. I know that some Americans are still unable to
+perceive that any such fundamental principle is at stake in Europe
+to-day. Extraordinary as it seems to me I hear intelligent men refer
+to the great war as if it were a local quarrel of no real consequence
+to us. Even the humblest _poilu_ in the trenches, the simplest
+working-woman in France, know that they are giving themselves not
+merely in the righteous cause of self-defense, but in the world's
+cause in defense of its best tradition, its highest ideals. Their
+cause is big enough to consecrate them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Therefore a new, a larger, a more vital life has already begun for
+invaded and unconquered France! In order to reap the blessings of
+war, a nation must have an irreproachable cause, and aside from
+Belgium, France has the clearest record of all the belligerents in
+this world war. She will gain most from it, not in land or wealth,
+but in honor and moral strength, in dignity and pride. She is ready
+to pay the great price for her soul. This is the one supreme
+inspiration that the French are giving an admiring world--their
+readiness to give all rather than yield to the evil that threatens
+them. With the light of such nobility in one's eyes, it is difficult,
+indeed, to be patient with the cynical clamor of comfortable neutrals
+for peace at any price. If there is anything of dignity and meaning
+in human life, it lies in selfless devotion to beliefs, to
+principles; it is readiness to sacrifice happiness, life, all, in
+their defense.
+
+And that is patriotism in its larger aspect. Our intellectuals
+discuss coldly the primitive quality of patriotism and its unexpected
+recrudescence in this world war. They talk of it in the jargon of
+social science as "group consciousness." Before I felt its fervor
+in the crisis of Italy's decision, in the sublime endurance of the
+French, I did not realize what patriotism might mean. It is not
+merely the instinctive love for the land of birth, loyalty to the
+known and familiar. Much more than that! The natal soil is but the
+symbol. Patriotism is human loyalty to the deeper, better part of
+one's own being, to the loves and the ideals and the beliefs of one's
+race. It is the love of family, of land, of tongue, of religion, of
+the woman who bore you and of the woman you get with child, of the
+God you reverence. It is loyalty to life as it has been poured into
+you by your forefathers, to those ideals which your race has conceived
+and given to the world. "_Viva Italia!_" "_Vive la France!_" is a
+prayer of the deepest, purest sort that the Italian or the Frenchman
+can breathe. Without these subconscious devotions and loyalties the
+human animal would be a forlorn complex of mind and sense. Those
+amorphous beings who, thanks to our modern economic wealth, have become
+"citizens of the world," who wander physically and intellectually from
+land to land, who taste of this and that without incorporating any
+supreme devotion in their blood, our cosmopolites and expatriates and
+intellectuals, froth of a too comfortable existence, give forth a
+hollow sound at the savage touch of war. They become pacifists. They
+can see neither good nor evil: all is a vague blur of "humanity."
+
+Patriotism is the supreme loyalty to life of the individual. Wherever
+this loyalty is instinctive, vivid, there some precious tradition has
+been bequeathed to a people that still burns in their blood. Latin
+patriotism is ardent like man's one great love for woman, ennobling
+the giver as well as the loved one; it is tender like the son's love
+for the mother, with the sanctity of acknowledgment of the debt of
+life. Can any vision of "internationalism" take the place of these
+powerful personal loyalties to racial ideals?... "Mere boys led to
+the slaughter" is the sentimentality one hears of the marching
+conscripts of European armies. Better even so than the curse of no
+supreme allegiance, or devotion, or readiness to sacrifice--than the
+aimless selfishness in which our American youth are brought up!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For every boy in Europe knows, as soon as he knows anything, that he
+owes one certain fixed debt, and that is service to his country, to
+that larger whole that has given him the best part of his own being.
+If need be, he owes it his life itself. It is an obligation he must
+fulfill before all other obligations, at no matter what inconvenience
+or sacrifice to himself, unquestioningly, immediately.
+
+What takes the place for the American youth of this primary
+obligation? Himself! He is expensively nurtured, schooled, put
+forward into life--for what? To help himself as best he can at the
+general table of society. He can never forget himself, subordinate
+his personal ambition to any transcendent loyalty. He becomes from
+his cradle the egotist.
+
+To-day under the shadow of world war we are taking thought of
+national protection, projecting schemes of defense including the
+enrollment of citizens who may be called upon to fight for their
+country. It is less important to teach our youth the military lessons
+of self-protection than it is to teach them the greater lesson of
+self-forgetfulness, of devotion to a national ideal--so that they may
+be ready to give their lives for that national ideal as the youth of
+Europe have given their lives to settle this world cause. Not a few
+hundreds of thousands of national guards, then, in order to secure
+ourselves from invasion are what we need, but that every man or woman
+born into the nation or adopting it as home should be made to feel
+the obligation of national service. It matters less what form that
+service should take, whether purely military or partly military and
+partly social. It is the service, the sense of obligation that counts
+for the individual and for the nation. The responsibility of service
+teaches the importance of ideas, the necessity of sacrifice. And he
+who is ready to sacrifice himself, to forget himself and become
+absorbed in the life that surrounds him, of which he is but an
+infinitesimal unit, to which he owes the best in him, has already
+achieved a larger peace than the pacifist dreams of.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Consider what happened to the youth of France a little more than
+a year ago. Suddenly with no preparation or warning they were called
+to defend their country from invasion. It was no longer possible to
+argue the rights of that diplomatic tangle into which European
+statesmen had muddled. Whatever the ultimate truth, the ultimate
+right of the controversy, the state--that larger self which was their
+home, their mesh of loves and interests and beliefs--demanded their
+service. The youth of France had been brought up with the knowledge
+that any day such a sacrifice might be required, with the
+consciousness deeply rooted in their beings that one of the necessary
+conditions of their living was to give their all at the call of the
+state. They conceived of no honorable alternative: it was as
+inevitable to pay this obligation as it is for decently minded
+citizens to pay their legal debts. They hurried to their mobilization
+posts, donned uniforms and equipment, and were shipped away in
+regiments to the front. Most of them did not worry about the
+possibility of death, but acted like all healthy human beings,
+ignoring what they could not affect, caught up in the novelty and the
+requirements of the new life. Yet deep in the consciousness of the
+most careless must have lain some thought that he might never return,
+that the cross-marked grave on the hillside, the pit, or the hospital
+might be waiting for him.
+
+This consciousness that he can no longer dispose of himself, at
+least for the finer spirit, must act as a great release. Having
+accepted his fate, and therefore willed it as the only possible
+choice for him, he becomes another person, a largely selfless person,
+a strangely older, calmer being capable of thinking and acting
+clearly, nobly. Once the great personal decision made, the resolve
+to forego life and happiness and personal achievement, a clogging
+burden of selfish considerations drop from within. So one can read
+the experience of those two young officers preserved in Henry
+Bordeaux's "Two Heroes." They were free as never before to do what
+lay before them,--their officers' duty,--simply, directly. Many things
+that they had previously valued seemed to have lost color, to have
+become trivial. They thought solely of acquitting themselves with,
+honor in what it was their fate to do. They were ready to obey
+because before death they were humble. They had begun to glimpse
+the blind mystery that is life, in which every one must needs act
+his part without questioning, with faith in its ultimate meaning,
+with the will to trust its end. They were brave because they were
+simple and single-hearted, selfless. They were strong because they
+disdained to be weak, having renounced all. If it were to be their
+fate to die unnoted, they were content with the satisfaction of having
+done what was expected of them. And if they died in glory, they were
+unaware of their honor, believing that they had done no more than
+any of their fellows would have done in the same opportunity.
+
+Thus, having laid down their lives for the cause that commanded
+their faith and loyalty, they found their real lives--larger, more
+beautiful, stronger.... Not once, but many thousands of times, has
+this miracle happened! Their graves are strewn, singly and in groups,
+over every field of eastern France. They paid the debt, did their
+part little or great, unknown or glorified by men. Literally they
+have given their blood for the soil of their fathers' land.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We know that they have given much more than their blood to that soil.
+Just as at the call to arms, the selfish, the mean, the vicious
+qualities of these lives dropped from them in the freedom of
+sacrifice accepted, and in place of egotistic preoccupations rose
+once more to the surface of their natures the ancient virtues of
+their race, so in their going they left for the others who lived, who
+were to be born, a tremendous legacy of honor and noble
+responsibility. By watering the soil with their blood they have made
+it infinitely more precious for every human being that treads upon
+it. They have helped to make mere life more significant for those who
+remain to mourn them. It can never again be quite the same
+commonplace affair, so lightly, cheaply spent, as it had been before.
+They have not left behind them joy, but faith. And that is why the
+faces of the earnest living who are able to realize this sacrifice of
+youth have a grave sternness in them which touches even the most
+careless stranger. Something of the glory created by the dead and the
+wounded radiates out even to us in a distant, peaceful land....
+
+But why, we ask, all this sacrifice, this cruel, agonizing sacrifice
+of war? That is a mystery too deep for any to fathom. It is better
+not to probe too insistently, to accept it as the man in Rheims,--"It
+must be better for the others afterward because of what we have
+endured." That is the expression of faith in life which is the better
+part of any religion. For what we suffer now, for what we give now of
+our most precious, it will be repaid to those who are to come. Life
+will be freer, grander, more significant: it will be a better world.
+Nobody who has seen or felt the heavy tragedy of this world war could
+endure its horror if he were not sustained by that faith. But with
+that faith the losses seem not too vast. One by one the world's great
+decisions must be made, in suffering, in blood and tears. Peace comes
+not through evasion or compromise, either for the individual or for
+the state.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The World Decision, by Robert Herrick
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