There, then, are ten letters of the fifty which came to me in
consequence of what I wrote in May, 1918, which was published in the
American Magazine for the following November. Ten will do. To read the
other forty would change no impression conveyed already by the ten, but
would merely repeat it. With varying phraseology their writers either
think we have hitherto misjudged England and that my facts are to the
point, or they express the stereotyped American antipathy to England
and treat my facts as we mortals mostly do when facts are
embarrassing--side-step them. What best pleased me was to find that
soldiers and sailors agreed with me, and not “high-brows” only.
May, 1918, as you will remember, was a very dark hour. We had come into
the war, had been in for a year; but events had not yet taken us out of
the well-nigh total eclipse flung upon our character by those blighting
words, “there is such a thing as being too proud to fight.” The British
had been told by their General that they were fighting with their backs
to the wall. Since March 23rd the tread of the Hun had been coming
steadily nearer to Paris. Belleau Wood and Chateau-Thierry had not yet
struck the true ring from our metal and put into the hands of Foch the
one further weapon that he needed. French morale was burning very low
and blue. Yet even in such an hour, people apparently American and
apparently grown up, were talking against England, our ally. Then and
thereafter, even as to-day, they talked against her as they had been
talking since August, 1914, as I had heard them again and again, indoors
and out, as I heard a man one forenoon in a crowd during the earlier
years of the war, the miserable years before we waked from our trance of
neutrality, while our chosen leaders were still misleading us.
Do you remember those unearthly years? The explosions, the plots, the
spies, the Lucitania, the notes, Mr. Bryan, von Bernstorff, half our
country--oh, more than half!--in different or incredulous, nothing
prepared, nothing done, no step taken, Theodore Roosevelt’s and Leonard
Wood’s almost the only voices warning us what was bound to happen, and
to get ready for it? Do you remember the bulletin boards? Did you grow,
as I did, so restless that you would step out of your office to see if
anything new had happened during the last sixty minutes--would stop as
you went to lunch and stop as you came back? We knew from the faces
of our friends what our own faces were like. In company we pumped up
liveliness, but in the street, alone with our apprehensions--do you
remember? For our future’s sake may everybody remember, may nobody
forget!
What the news was upon a certain forenoon memorable to me, I do not
recall, and this is of no consequence; good or bad, the stream of
by-passers clotted thickly to read it as the man chalked it line upon
line across the bulletin board. Citizens who were in haste stepped off
the curb to pass round since they could not pass through this crowd of
gazers. Thus this on the sidewalk stood some fifty of us, staring
at names we had never known until a little while ago, Bethincourt,
Malancourt, perhaps, or Montfaucon, or Roisel; French names of small
places, among whose crumbled, featureless dust I have walked since,
where lived peacefully a few hundred or a few thousand that are now
a thousand butchered or broken-hearted. Through me ran once again the
wonder that had often chilled me since the abdication of the Czar which
made certain the crumbling of Russia: after France, was our turn coming?
Should our fields, too, be sown with bones, should our little towns
among the orchards and the corn fall in ashes amongst which broken
hearts would wander in search of some surviving stick of property? I had
learned to know that a long while before the war the eyes of the Hun,
the bird of prey, had been fixed upon us as a juicy morsel. He had
written it, he had said it. Since August, 1914, these Pan-German schemes
had been leaking out for all who chose to understand them. A great many
did not so choose. The Hun had wanted us and planned to get us, and now
more than ever before, because he intended that we should pay his war
bills. Let him once get by England, and his sword would cut through our
fat, defenseless carcass like a knife through cheese.
A voice arrested my reverie, a voice close by in the crowd. It said,
“Well, I like the French. But I’ll not cry much if England gets hers.
What’s England done in this war, anyway?”
“Her fleet’s keeping the Kaiser out of your front yard, for one thing,”
retorted another voice.
With assurance slightly wobbling and a touch of the nasal whine, the
first speaker protested, “Well, look what George III done to us. Bad as
any Kaiser.”
“Aw, get your facts straight!” It was said with scornful force.
“Don’t you know George III was a German? Don’t you know it was
Hessians--they’re Germans--he hired to come over here and kill Americans
and do his dirty work for him? And his Germans did the same dirty work
the Kaiser’s are doing now. We’ve got a letter written after the battle
of Long Island by a member of our family they took prisoner there. And
they stripped him and they stole his things and they beat him down with
the butts of their guns--after he had surrendered, mind--when he was
surrendered and naked, and when he was down they beat him some more.
That’s Germans for you. Only they’ve been getting worse while the rest
of the world’s been getting better. Get your facts straight, man.”
A number of us were now listening to this, and I envied the historian
his ingenious promptness--I have none--and I hoped for more of this
timely debate. But debate was over. The anti-Englishman faded to
silence. Either he was out of facts to get straight, or lacked what
is so pithily termed “come-back.” The latter, I incline to think; for
come-back needs no facts, it is a self-feeder, and its entire absence
in the anti-Englishman looks as if he had been a German. Germans do
not come back when it goes against them, they bleat “Kamerad!”--or
disappear. Perhaps this man was a spy--a poor one, to be sure--yet doing
his best for his Kaiser: slinking about, peeping, listening, trying
to wedge the Allies apart, doing his little bit towards making friends
enemies, just as his breed has worked to set enmity between ourselves
and Japan, ourselves and Mexico, France and England, France and Italy,
England and Russia, between everybody and everybody else all the world
over, in the sacred name and for the sacred sake of the Kaiser. Thus has
his breed, since we occupied Coblenz, run to the French soldiers with
lies about us and then run to us with lies about the French soldiers,
overlooking in its providential stupidity the fact that we and the
French would inevitably compare notes. Thus too is his breed, at the
moment I write these words, infesting and poisoning the earth with a
propaganda that remains as coherent and as systematically directed as
ever it was before the papers began to assure us that there was nothing
left of the Hohenzollern government.