our minds with the contest there raging that we give but little thought
to the progress of events in the far countries tributary to the Tigris
River. For a time, the heroic resistance of General Townsend to the
Turkish forces which surrounded him aided by the natural obstacles of
river and climate, claimed a share of our interest, and later, the
splendid and successful work achieved by the new British army under
General Maude, awakened renewed interest in a campaign designed to
split Islam into two parts: one, acknowledging the domination of the
Turk and his German masters; the other, a new Caliphat of Bagdad,
Arabian, rather than Turkish, looking to the ideals of justice and
freedom, rather than to the rule of the sword; finding its inspiration
in the tradition of the enlightened and humane Haroun-al-Raschid,
rather than the warring, bloody conquerors and Muhammed and Sulìman.
Still later, the northward progress of British arms extended over the
greater part of Palestine, and the capture of Jerusalem brought the
sacred places of Israel and of Christianity within the control of
Christendom after five centuries of Turkish occupation.
These campaigns are only second in importance to the progress of the
German invasion of France; for if the British successes in Arabia and
Palestine shall be maintained, and the Islamites of Egypt, Arabia and
Mesopotamia shall look in the future to the Caliph of Bagdad, not to
the Sultan of Turkey, as their spiritual head, the great German scheme
of aggression in the Near East will have been defeated.
The subtle Teuton suggestion to the Turk of a Pan-Turanian league,
was but a scheme for the promotion of a closer Turkish organization
under German control, as Raemaekers’ cartoon, “A Tid-Bit for the Sick
Man,” so cleverly intimates. The Turks should have said to themselves,
“Beware of the Greeks--the Prussians--and the gifts they bring.” A
German gift is like the shirt of Nessus,--it will consume utterly those
who accept it.
Not alone on the shores of the Mediterranean, but on the Persian
Gulf, on the Baltic, on the English Channel, in the Caribbean, on the
Pacific,--there is no limit to the schemes of expansion of German
control to which that nation in its mad lust of power has given itself.
Never since the dawn of recorded history has an issue been made so
plain. Aut Cæsar aut nullus. The world must choose between Germany,
the highly developed, hyperorganized, scientific state, proceeding on
the openly avowed theory that might alone makes right, and that no
principle of ethics, morality or religion must be allowed to affect
or deter a course which scientific militarism determines to be best
calculated to attain a pre-determined end, and the other nations, who
believe in God and in His justice, who conceive that it doth not profit
a nation to gain the whole world at the cost of its soul.
Once this issue is manifest to the world, the result cannot be in doubt.
GEORGE W. WICKERSHAM.
[Illustration]
_Plain Language from Truthful James_
_The Mexican-Japanese Plot_
“For ways that are dark
And tricks that are vain--”
[Illustration]
_Helping Hindenburg Home_
“We regret being unable on this occasion to follow the counsels of our
masters, the French, but the American flag has been forced to retire.
This is unendurable, and none of our soldiers would understand their
not being asked to do whatever is necessary to reëstablish a situation
which is humiliating to us and unacceptable to our country’s honor. We
are going to counter-attack.”
This was a message sent by an American general in command of American
forces south of the Marne on Monday afternoon after the Germans had
succeeded in forcing the Americans back towards Conde-en-Brie.
The French commander had informed the American general that the early
German success could not have any great effect on the fate of the
battle; that it was understood perfectly that after hard fighting the
Americans had slowly retired, and that it was not expected that they
immediately launch a counter-attack. He added that a counter-attack
could be postponed without risk, and it might be better to give the
American troops an hour’s rest.
Immediately after the American general sent the above message, which
is quoted by the correspondent of the “Matin,” the Americans launched
their counter-attack and the lost ground was soon recovered, with an
additional half mile taken from the Germans for good measure.
_The New York Times, July 18, 1918._
[Illustration]
_A Bad Prophet_
_The All-Highest: “Only a sham war with Uncle Sam? Oh, Hollweg, you are
a bad prophet!”_
One of the delusions the German Government and its General Staff have
been laboring under for many years is that the United States could not
create an army that was worth consideration as a foe. That Government
and its General Staff are tasting the quality of our troops in the
field, and the flavor is bitter on their tongues. One hundred and
twenty-six years ago there was fought a battle in France (at Valmy,
within the zone of war today) on the date that France first called
herself a republic. Kellermann won that battle against the Prussians
and Austrians with levies of new troops from the lower and middle
classes of France, who “found that they could face cannon balls, pull
triggers, and cross bayonets without having been drilled into military
machines, and without being officered by scions of noble houses.” They
had, it seems, the same spirit we like to think animates our army,
which the Germans abroad and some critics at home denied our men: “they
awoke to the consciousness of instinctive soldiership.”
_The Army and Navy Journal._
[Illustration]
_At the Holland Frontier_
WHETHER THE WAR BE LONG OR SHORT, THE QUICKEST ROAD TO PEACE IS THE
ROAD STRAIGHT AHEAD OF US, WITH NO DIVISION AMONG THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.
WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN.
[Illustration]
_A Rehearsal_
“_When I say, Down with Wilson! you all cheer!_”
[Illustration]
_The Path of Kultur_
Here ran a road for lovers once,
With maples in the moon;
And under a bridge a water went
Weaving a dreamy rune.
And high upon the sycamores,
The nightingales all night
Besieged the dark with melody,
Disturbed the boughs with flight.
And here in coverts of tall grass
Looked up a friendly spring,
Glad to behold a face bent down,
Or feel a fleeting wing.
But now the lovers come no more;
The road is rutted and marred
By wheels and shrieking shells: the trees
Are shattered, chopt and charred.
New graves are billowing now: the field
Like windy water heaves:
The nightingales are gone: the spring
Is choked with bloody leaves.
And here at noon a vulture swoops
On obscene errands bound:
And here at night remembering ghosts
Go by without a sound.
EDWIN MARKHAM.
[Illustration]
_To the Victor!_
_France crowns with laurel the dead American aviator._
Tho’ the American mother mourns across the seas for her hero son, who
has touched the skies in France, the foster mother lays her laurel of
glory on the bier of Youth, whose brave spirit in passing welds an
eternal bond of sympathy and union to the end.
GERALDINE FARRAR.
_June 23, 1918._
[Illustration]
_The Eyes of the Army_
The great poet of Victoria’s reign, in his wondrous vision of the
future,
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
From the nation’s airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunder-storm;
Till the war drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.
Dealing not with the shadowy future but with the actual present the
great Artist of the Great War sees aerial navigation, not in terms of
commerce nor of battle engines, but as the “Eyes of the Army”; the
sense without which the terrestrial movements of war, both by land and
sea, tend to become mere blind and purposeless blundering. With one
graceful figure in a finely balanced design the artist tells the story.
Future generations will be grateful to the Prussians for one thing--and
one thing only. From war--that “noble art of murdering,” as Thackeray
called it, they have stripped the last vestiges of romantic glamor.
They have not hesitated to press the premises of militarism to their
logical conclusion,--with results that have staggered humanity.
In one field only has it been possible for something of the old
knightly chivalry to linger. Romance, driven from earth, has taken
wings; and the world, sated with horrors of trench and shambles,
thrills with eager wonder at the new science of the sky; at the
individual skill and daring of its pilots and their wonderful service
to their fighting brethren on earth.
But even as we read of these things come tales of Zeppelin raids over
defenseless cities and the deliberate dropping of bombs upon hospitals.
Civilized warfare! it is a contradiction in terms. It may be
necessary,--it has proved to be necessary, for civilized men to fight
the barbarians in order to uphold and preserve the great principle
of individual liberty; but war must come to an end among civilized
peoples; and to that end there must be a closer and closer union of
such as care for law and order, believe that the weak have rights which
must be protected, and are willing to base their governments on the
firm and enduring foundations of LIBERTY, EQUALITY and FRATERNITY.
THOMAS MOTT OSBORNE.
_July 19, 1918._
[Illustration]
“_Is It Nothing to You, All Ye Who Pass By?_”
All we need to remember hour by hour is that we are living through the
greatest crisis in the history of the world; that the greatest number
of people are concerned in it ever concerned in one thing before; and
that the most important epoch concerning humanity since the birth of
Christ is now at hand; that humanity is about to fall to a lower plane
of living or rise to a higher one than it has ever reached; that we can
only do our little share toward that rising by stiffening ourselves
to a long endurance. We have proven our mere ability to give valuable
service. What we must prove now is our patience and steadfastness,
without which brilliancy is worthless. We must strike a pace which we
can hold, both mentally and physically and plod on together. We must
and we will be ready, for our own sake, for our country’s sake and for
the sake of what the world was created for.
RACHEL CROTHERS.
[Illustration]
_The Rainbow Division Leaves for France_
As the rainbow is heaven’s token of faith, so have we faith in these
modern knights journeying to beloved France to give battle to invading
barbarians.
Ponder a moment over these men of the Rainbow Division, lads with minds
clean as their hearts are true, and compare them with the blood-craving
hordes reared in a school having no other aim than to kill their fellow
beings. One is Man in the superlative, and for the other there is no
name sufficiently abhorrent.
When an American soldier enters Hun territory we know how scrupulously
the laws of humanity will be respected: he will at least be knightly
and merciful.
And the four years’ record of German savagery is so well known that it
must forever befoul the pages of history.
Lack of opportunity in the library has prevented a thorough exploration
of the unspeakable atrocities of the early Huns who under Attila
ravaged a great part of Europe. But sufficiently have I read to be
convinced that the Huns and Vandals and Goths of early history,
compared with the Hohenzollern-inspired fiends, were scarcely more than
bungling altruists. We know it to be fact that German soldiers murdered
priests and raped nuns in Belgium, violated practically every young
woman in the Aisne and Champagne, razed defenseless towns and hamlets
in these French Departments, murdered old people and children and
mutilated youths everywhere, delighted in destroying hospital ships and
treated Red Cross signs as targets for their guns, inoculated French
prisoners as a means of furthering the Berlin plan to diminish the
French race, and in cold blood murdered scores of women and children on
the _Lusitania_.
These are awful indictments, with not one excusable on the ground of
military need or expediency. Given trial at the bar of civilization
their perpetrators must forever be judged as outside the pale of
humanity and hereafter can have no standing in lands where the
principles of Christianity and humanity have a meaning. With my own
eyes I have seen scores of proofs of German “frightfulness”; with me
it is not hearsay. And remember that it was none other than Goethe who
wrote that “the Prussian was born a brute, and civilization will make
him ferocious.”
Positive is it that the United States and her Allies will crush the
conscienceless militarism of Germany, and ever of good omen is the
Rainbow, telling of improving skies and perfect conditions for the
morrow.
FREDERIC COURTLAND PENFIELD, _American Ambassador
to Austria-Hungary_, 1913-1917.
[Illustration]
_Russia Reborn_
In a hundred years no people has been so tortured and abused by rulers
of its own blood and faith as the Russians. The free peoples have
nothing in their experience by which they can imagine the greed and
cruelty of which the subjects of the Romanoffs have been the victims.
No adequate picture of the diabolical old régime can be painted till
scholars have had time to explore its archives and expose the dark
forces that operated it.
Let no one look for Freed Russia to be shining and beautiful. From the
gloomy caverns in which they have mouldered the Russian people stagger
out upon the sunlit heights of freedom weak, bent, half blind. Few of
the older will ever conquer the dense ignorance in which they were kept
by autocracy. Few of the characters twisted and deformed by oppression
will ever become quite straight. In the behavior of this people there
will be exhibited folly, fanaticism and brutality that will make the
peoples born free uneasy as to the new sister.
Whatever happens, doubt not that the Russians are gifted and
great-hearted. Their excesses have proclaimed how much they were
held back and brutalized by the Tsars. It will take long for them to
rid themselves of the traces of their servitude and misery. Even the
children born in the new era will catch from their parents some of the
evil heritage. Only the grandchildren of the common people of today
will come into the full birthright of the free and prove the worth that
is in the Russian race.
EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS.
[Illustration]
_Higher Than a Sour Apple Tree_
Other wars end with those who made them. It is the will of the German
Emperor that _his_ war should pass on like a blight from generation to
generation upon those whose fathers dared to stand against the ravager.
To this end he has not only slaughtered and enslaved the defenders; he
has sought to destroy the very fruitfulness of the land whereby their
descendants must live.
To me the deliberate, coldly reckoned murder of the invaded countries’
trees and vines so that the children of the slain and enslaved and
their children’s children may draw no sustenance from the kindly
earth--that seems the most perverse, the most detestable, the most
typical of all the crimes of Kaiserism.
The sterilization of Mother Earth! It took the mind of a Wilhelm to
conceive it. And for that offence against generations unborn he shall
hang, higher than was ever ruler before him, gibbeted in the righteous
hatred of an outraged posterity.
SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS.
[Illustration]
“_What a Mean Trick to Turn on That Strong Light!_”
“Peace must be framed on so equitable a basis that the nations would
not wish to disturb it. It must be guaranteed by destruction of
Prussian military power, so that the confidence of the German people
shall be put in the equity of their cause and not in the might of their
armies.... Europe is again drenched with the blood of its bravest and
its best, but do not forget the great succession of hallowed causes.
They are the stations of the cross on the road to the emancipation
of mankind. I again appeal to the people of this country and beyond
that they should continue to fight for the great goal of international
rights and international justice, so that never again shall brute force
sit on the throne of justice nor barbaric strength wield the sceptre
over liberty.”
_From the Rt. Hon. David Lloyd-George’s Glasgow speech
on war aims, June 29, 1917._
[Illustration]
_Christmas, 1917_
On the day of the Nativity, the Infant Brother of Humanity was born and
was laid in a manger, there being no room for his human mother at the
inn. But wherever he lay--there, through the mystery of his kinship,
was the shining Gateway of Heaven. That translucent Light, from the
moment of its appearance, intensified, as by opposite polarity, the
baleful lights from all unholy fires in human breasts. Herod was
first aroused to the Slaughter of the Innocents, and he has had his
successors in every age during the growth of Christendom.
As the Light of the World has expanded these nineteen centuries,
shining in the hearts of men, ever awakening new ideas of Truth,
Justice, and Mercy, against every fresh gleam, promising wider horizons
of human Love and Sympathy, have been arrayed the brutish hosts,
with Hatred and Murder in their hardened hearts. For the present
generation has been reserved the vision of the very Armageddon of
this Conflict, in which the world is divided against itself. The
Powers precipitating it inaugurated it and have in its whole course
attended it with every conceivable form of atrocity and outrage against
noncombatants--innocent men, women, and children. But that Heavenly
Light which shone in the stable at Bethlehem can never be put out!
HENRY MILLS ALDEN.
[Illustration]
_Helping Uncle Sam to Get Up Speed_
“The military masters of Germany denied us the right to be neutral.
They filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and
conspirators and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their
own behalf. When they found that they could not do that, then agents
diligently spread sedition among us and sought to draw our own citizens
from their allegiance....
“They have learned discretion. They keep within the law. It is opinion
they utter now, not sedition. They proclaim the liberal purposes of
their masters; declare this a foreign war which can touch America
with no danger to either her lands or her institutions ... and seek
to undermine the Government with false professions of loyalty to its
principles.
“But they will make no headway. The false betray themselves always in
every accent.... The facts are patent to all the world, and nowhere
are they more plainly seen than in the United States, where we are
accustomed to deal with facts and not with sophistries; and the great
fact that stands out above all the rest is that this is a people’s war,
a war for freedom and justice and self-government among all the nations
of the world.”
_From President Wilson’s Flag Day Address, June 14, 1917._
[Illustration]
_The Wind of Democracy_
“Without doubt, the majority of the German nation is still monarchist.
The different peoples of Germany still hold to their princes, more or
less, according to the individual character of the sovereigns. But
that confidence in the supreme chief of the Empire is still entirely
intact is an affirmation which, after three years of war, cannot be
maintained.... Confidence in the direction of the Empire has begun to
disappear among the German people.... They begin to ask themselves how
it happens that nearly all the world is in arms against us, and who is
responsible for it.”
_Reply of Prince von Hohenlohe to the clerical deputy, Spahn,
in the Reichstag._
[Illustration]
“_This One for the Babies_”
Germany, in her war against Civilization, has disregarded not
only International Law and the ordinary laws of humanity, but has
ruthlessly set aside the four great laws of the social order which
all civilized nations recognize as having a divine sanction. “Thou
shalt not bear false witness.” She has broken her treaties and lied
openly, frequently, brazenly. “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” She has
permitted, if she has not given official sanction to rape committed
upon a scale never before known in the history of the civilized world.
“Thou shalt not steal.” She robbed her neighbor’s hills of their coal
and iron, her neighbor’s fields of their standing crops, her neighbor’s
banks of their money, her neighbor’s houses of their pictures,
statuary and books, and what she could not carry away she has in mere
wantonness destroyed. “Thou shalt not kill.” She has murdered thousands
of defenceless men, women, children, and little babes, and has done
this not in a sudden and feverish rage, but as part of a deliberately
conceived and carefully executed policy. One must multiply Raemaekers’
picture by the thousand in order to get its full significance.
LYMAN ABBOTT.
[Illustration]
_A Scene on the Somme_
“Infinitely interesting is our contact with the American troops. They
have occupied the sector immediately beside ours. We have seen them at
work, and could form an idea, and it should be told and retold that
they are marvelous. The Americans are soldiers by nature, and their
officers have the desire to learn with an enthusiasm and an idealistic
ardor very remarkable. There is the same spirit among the privates.
They ask questions with a touching good-will, setting aside all conceit
or prejudice. Naturally they have the faults of all new troops. They
show themselves too much and expose themselves imprudently, letting
themselves be carried away by their ardor, not knowing when to spare
themselves or to seek shelter or when to risk everything for an end.
This experience will be quickly learned.
“As for bravery, activity, and discipline, they are marvelous. They
absolutely astonished us on a morning of attack. The cannonading,
suddenly becoming furious, had just thrown me out of my bunk. No doubt
about it, it was a Verdun attack. Taking time to seize my revolver,
put on my helmet, and gather up several documents, I descended to
the streets. When I arrived there they were already filing by with
rapid, easy, decided steps, marching in perfect order in silence with
admirable resolution, and above all with striking discipline, to their
fighting positions. It was fine. You can have no idea how cheering it
was to my Poilus.”
--_From a letter of a French officer published in the Paris “Temps.”_
[Illustration]
_Hollweg as Robespierre_
_The Kaiser: “He has managed to fool the German Socialists. Why should
he not fool the Russian Socialists?”_
Few things have been more disheartening in the course of the War than
the way in which the Teutonic foes of liberty have used so many friends
of liberty in Russia as unwitting instruments to undermine and destroy
the resistance of the Russian people to the German armies.
Vast territories, amounting to nearly half a million square miles
in area, have thus been abandoned to German domination, practically
without a struggle; and over fifty million people in the abandoned
regions have seen their prospects of freedom vanish.
The German armies thus released from the eastern front and poured into
northern France, have enormously increased the difficulties of the
Armies of Liberty, battling in France and Belgium to save the world for
Democracy.
J. G. PHELPS STOKES.
[Illustration]
_President Wilson’s Declaration_
Raemaekers is, here, having the President say:
“When Germany is defeated, and peace can be discussed, we shall pay
the full price of peace,--namely, justice for all the nations.”
We know what justice will be for the nations spoiled. But what will
be justice for the spoiler? We know what this latter would be to an
individual; and a nation is only a greater individual, capable of
greater mischief, subject to greater punishment.