in the way. The Huns were trained to fight things that they could see,
that they could touch, that they could measure, and especially things
that they could frighten and kill. The soul of France they could not
see, just as they could not, at the opening of the war, see or
understand the soul of Belgium, and just as they did not believe in or
comprehend the soul of America, later. But the soul of France barred
their way and they did not pass, for they could neither frighten her
nor kill her.
For though the giant ages heave the hill
And break the shore, and evermore
Make and break and work their will;
Though world on world in myriad myriads roll
Round us, each with different powers
And other forms of life than ours,
What know we greater than the soul?
* * * * *
The right is more precious than peace. We shall fight for the things
which we have always carried nearest our hearts. To such a task we
dedicate our lives.
WOODROW WILSON, 1917.
VERDUN
She is a wall of brass;
You shall not pass! You shall not pass!
Spring up like summer grass,
Surge at her, mass on mass,
Still shall you break like glass,
Splinter and break like shivered glass,
But pass?
You shall not pass!
Germans, you shall not, shall not pass!
God's hand has written on the wall of brass--
You shall not pass! You shall not pass!
The valleys are quaking,
The torn hills are shaking,
The earth and the sky seem breaking.
But unbroken, undoubting, a wonder and sign,
She stands, France stands, and still holds to the line.
She counts her wounded and her dead;
You shall not pass!
She sets her teeth, she bows her head;
You shall not pass!
Till the last soul in the fierce line has fled,
You shall not pass!
Help France? Help France?
Who would not, thanking God for this great chance,
Stretch out his hands and run to succor France?
HAROLD BEGBIE.
THE BEAST IN MAN
A German leader once said, "The oldest right in the world is the right
of the strongest." This is true and will always continue to be true as
long as the world is made up only of inanimate matter and lifeless
forces and of living, thinking beings who consider "the strongest" as
meaning the powers or things that can cause the greatest destruction
and the most terrible evil. The beasts recognize these as the
strongest, and without question admit that the oldest right in the
world is the chief right in the world.
But as men have become civilized, they have come to fear destruction,
and even the loss of life, less and less, and have learned to feel the
strength of beauty, truth, justice, mercy, purity, and innocence. So it
comes to pass that Robert Burns mourns when his plow turns under a
mountain daisy or destroys the home of a field mouse. Because he feels
the influence of the innocent and the helpless, the "wee, modest,
crimson-tipped flower" and the "wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous
beastie," he gives us two of the most beautiful poems in the English
language, poems that, by the power of their tenderness, truth, and
beauty, have brought tears to the eyes of many a strong, brave man who
feared no enemy.
Such was the power of Joan of Arc when she led the French soldiers to
battle and to victory,--simply the power of her belief and her faith,
for she was a simple, untrained peasant girl, knowing nothing of how
battles are to be won.
Such is the power of the English nurse, Edith Cavell, executed by the
Germans as a spy, because she helped English and Belgians to escape
from the German horrors in Belgium by crossing the line into Holland.
Such is the power of the murdered mothers and children on the
_Lusitania_, the memory of whose wrongs cause English and American
soldiers to go "over the top," crying "Lusitania! Lusitania!"
Such is the power of undaunted Cardinal Mercier, who in the very midst
of German officers and troops, denounces German atrocities in Belgium,
and yet is himself untouched.
The exercise of the right of the strongest, the _right_ which comes
through _might_, brings about war. General Sherman, who knew the
terrors of war from what he saw in our Civil War, said, "War is hell."
He could not describe its horrors and so he used the one word that
means to most people the most horrible state and place in which human
beings can suffer. For many years most men have realized that war is
the most dreadful scourge of the human race, and that it should be
abolished. But as is always the case, men cannot agree,--which is, of
course, the chief reason why there are wars. In the face of terrible
calamities, disasters, and great crises, men will agree. Perhaps the
World War will prove the great disaster that will lead men to do away
forever with war.
For twenty-five years before the world's peace was rudely broken by the
ambitions of Germany, the people of other countries had been urgently
seeking some means of doing away with war. Peace societies had been
organized and wealthy men had donated money to be used in efforts to
secure the permanent peace of the world. A Peace Palace had been
erected at The Hague from funds donated by the American
multi-millionaire, Andrew Carnegie, who had also set aside a fund of
$10,000,000 for the purpose of keeping the world at peace. The Nobel
prize of $40,000 was awarded annually to the person anywhere in the
world who had done the most for peace. Theodore Roosevelt, while
President, won this by settling the Russian-Japanese War. The Tsar of
Russia had proposed at one of the conferences of nations held at the
Peace Palace that the nations should gradually do away with military
preparations. We can see now why all these efforts failed. Germany had
her mind and heart set on war and on conquering the world.
Most men agree that war is unnecessary, and before the German attack
upon Belgium and upon the liberty of the world, many leaders of thought
in other countries were sure a great war could never occur in modern
times. One group argued that its cost in money would be so great that
no nation could meet it for more than a few months. But the United
States is, in 1918, spending nearly $50,000,000 a day for war, and she
can continue to do so for some years, if necessary. The cost in dollars
will never prevent war nor make a great war a very brief one.
But think of what the cost of the war for one year would accomplish if
spent for the purposes of peace, for construction instead of
destruction. Ten billion dollars, the approximate cost of the war for
the United States for the year 1918, if put at interest at four per
cent, would earn $400,000,000, or about the cost of the Panama Canal.
This interest would send 500,000 young men and women to college each
year, and pay all their necessary expenses. It would do away with all
the slums and poverty of our great cities. If the cost to one nation
for one year would, as a permanent fund, accomplish this, it is easy to
realize that the world could almost be made an ideal one in which to
live, if the money that all the nations spend upon the World War could
have been saved and made a permanent fund for the betterment of world
conditions.
Another group said, "Modern science has made war so terrible and so
destructive that men will not take part in it, or if this is not true
now, it soon will be." When we think of what has occurred and is
occurring every day in the present war, this seems also unlikely.
When we read of guns that will carry a shell weighing a ton for over
twenty-five miles which will, when it explodes, destroy everything
within an eighth of a mile, and of guns less destructive that will
carry over seventy-five miles, almost wholly destroying a church and
killing sixty-five men, women, and children; when we read of bombs
dropped from the sky, killing innocent women and children, hundreds of
miles from the field of battle; of the terrible work of poison gases
and of liquid fire; of battles above the clouds from which men fall to
death in blazing air-planes, and of battles beneath the waves in which
men sink in submarines to be suffocated to death; of an entire ridge
being undermined and blown up by tons of dynamite, with an explosion
heard nearly one hundred miles away and killing thousands: how can we
believe that war is likely soon to become so terrible that men will not
engage in it, if they are willing to do so now? Sir Gilbert Parker well
says: "Guns have been invented before which the stoutest fortresses
shrivel into fiery dust; shells destroy men in platoons, blow them to
pieces, bury them alive; death pours from the clouds and spouts upward
through the sea; motor-power hurls armies of men on points of attack in
masses never hitherto employed; concealment is made well nigh
impossible. These things, however, have but made war more difficult and
dreadful; they have not made it impossible. They have only succeeded in
plumbing profounder depths of human courage, and evoking higher
qualities of endurance than have ever been seen before."
No, most people who are thinking about the subject to-day are agreed
that wars will not end because of the destructive power of men, but
through the constructive power of human feeling and intellect. When the
great majority of men recognize, as so many do now, that as the world
exists to-day, no nation can ever gain by a war of aggression, but that
the nation at war loses her best, her young and strong, and has left
only the old and defective who cannot fight, that she loses her
industrial and commercial prosperity as well, and through these losses
loses more than she can ever gain by conquest; when all nations realize
that the destruction of great cathedrals like Rheims, of the beautiful
town hall at Lille, of the unique Cloth Market at Ypres, and of a
University like that of Louvain makes the whole world poorer beyond
measure, then will men agree that no small group of men, and no single
nation shall, in the future, be allowed to cause war; and then they
will organize some power strong enough to prevent war.
Then will come the League of Nations to Enforce Peace, or the
Parliament of Man of which Tennyson wrote in "Locksley Hall"
seventy-five years ago. The poet seemed as in a vision to see the
present World War with its terrors and its battles in the air. Perhaps
his vision of the abolition of war and the federation of the world is
equally true.
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
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 rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' 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 throbb'd no longer, and the battle flags were furled
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
[Illustration: SIR DOUGLAS HAIG--IN COMMAND OF THE BRITISH ARMIES
_Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N.Y._]
WHEN GERMANY LOST THE WAR[4]
No man knows exactly when and where the three and twenty allies will
win the war, but all men know when and where Germany lost it. It was
four years ago this morning, at a point near Gemmenich, a village
southwest of Aix-la-Chapelle. It was then and there that the first gray
uniform crossed the frontier from Germany into Belgium.
An hour before and it was not too late for Germany to win the war, or
at least to lose it with honor. An hour afterward, and Germany was
doomed. What has befallen her since that 4th of August, what will
befall her in the future, were predetermined from the fatal instant of
that summer morning when the first German soldier trod where Prussia
had promised he should never go. There is not a German killed to-day in
the flight to the Vesle whose fate was not written at Gemmenich.
It was not merely that the invasion of a land guaranteed perpetual
neutrality brought Great Britain into the fight and turned into a world
war what Germany had hoped would be a small, swift, and easy campaign.
It was the exposure of Germany herself. Know of her what we may to-day,
we thought of her otherwise four years ago yesterday. She had thrown
about herself a mantle which hid the sword and the thick, studded
boots. She worked at science and played at art. She sang and thumped
the piano. She cleaned her streets and washed her children's faces.
Many persons in America and England believed that she was efficient and
that her very _verboten_ signs were guides to the ideal life. Even as
the Kaiser reviewed his armies he babbled of peace; peace, to believe
him, was the first object of his life.
We do not know of any writer who has condensed the proof of Germany's
falsehood and cowardice into so few words as Von Bethmann-Hollweg, who,
as Chancellor of the Empire, spoke as follows to the Reichstag four
years ago this afternoon:
Gentlemen, we are now acting in self-defence. Necessity knows no
law. Our troops have occupied Luxemburg and have possibly
already entered on Belgian soil. [The speaker knew that the
invasion had begun.]
Gentlemen, that is a breach of international law.
The French Government has notified Brussels that it would
respect Belgian neutrality as long as the adversary respected
it. But we know that France stood ready for an invasion. France
could wait, we could not. A French invasion on our flank and the
lower Rhine might have been disastrous. Thus we were forced to
ignore the rightful protests of the Governments of Luxemburg
and Belgium. The injustice--I speak openly--the injustice we
thereby commit we will try to make good as soon as our military
aims have been attained. He who is menaced as we are and is
fighting for his all, can only consider the one and best way to
strike.
There stood the German Empire, intensively trained in the arts of war
for forty years, pleading cowardice in extenuation of her broken word.
"France could wait, we could not!" A brave man, Bethmann-Hollweg,
unless he knew before he spoke that the whole nation had sunk to the
immoral level of the cowards who invaded Belgium because they feared
that on a fair field France would have beaten them! It is curious that
in the whole record of German state-craft in the war, the Chancellor's
confession of his empire's degradations stands out almost like a clean
thing.
The Chancellor did not deceive the people except in his implication
that France would have struck through Belgium if Germany had not. He
did not deceive himself, either. He knew the cowardice of Germany. It
is probable that he believed, as the Junkers believed, that England,
too, was a coward. Prince Lichnowsky had told them the truth about
England, but they had not believed. In the years of Kultur, they had
forgotten what honor was like. They chose to credit the stories that
England was torn with dissensions, threatened with rebellion in
Ireland and India, nervous from labor troubles, and not only physically
unprepared for war but mentally and morally unfit for war. Even the
telegram of Sir Edward Grey, communicated on the day of Belgium's
invasion, to the German Government by the British Ambassador at Berlin,
did not dispel the illusion about Great Britain:
In view of the fact that Germany declined to give the same
assurance respecting Belgium as France gave last week in reply
to our request made simultaneously at Berlin and Paris, we must
repeat that request and ask that a satisfactory reply to it and
to my telegram of this morning be received here by 12 o'clock
to-night. If not, you are instructed to ask for your passports
and to say that His Majesty's Government feels bound to take all
steps in their power to uphold the neutrality of Belgium and the
observance of a treaty to which Germany is as much a party as
ourselves.
Even that memorable document, we say, did not convince Germany that
common honor still lived across the Channel. The Foreign Secretary, Von
Jagow, a mere tool of the Kaiser, took it mechanically; but Von
Bethmann-Hollweg added to the sum of German cowardice. Brave as he had
been in the Reichstag, he whimpered to Sir Edward Goschen when he saw
that "12 o'clock to-night" on paper. This account of the conversation
is Goschen's, but the German Chancellor later confirmed the
Englishman's version:
I found the Chancellor very agitated. His Excellency at once
began a harangue which lasted for about twenty minutes. He said
that the step taken by His Majesty's Government was terrible to
a degree; just for a word--"neutrality," a word which in war
time had so often been disregarded--just for a scrap of paper,
Great Britain was going to make war on a kindred nation who
desired nothing better than to be friends with her.
When he added that it was a matter of "life and death" to Germany to
advance through Belgium, the British Ambassador replied that it was "a
matter of life and death for the honor of Great Britain that she should
keep her solid engagement to do her utmost to defend Belgium's
neutrality if attacked." Her utmost! Aye, she has done it!
A last gasp from the German Chancellor: "But at what price will that
compact have been kept? Has the British Government thought of that?"
Sir Edward Goschen replied that "fear of consequences could hardly be
regarded as an excuse for breaking solemn engagements," but these words
were lost. The German Chancellor had abandoned himself to the
contemplation of the truth: that morning Germany had been beaten when a
soldier stepped across a line. How long the decision might be in
dispute Bethmann-Hollweg could not know, but he must have known that,
cheating, Germany had loaded the dice at the wrong side. If she had
struck fairly at France, England would have had to stand by, neutral.
The seas would be open to Germany. If France had violated Belgium's
neutrality--as Germany professed to believe she intended to do--England
would have attacked France, keeping the pledge made in the Treaty of
London. But now, because England weighed a promise and not the price of
keeping it, there could be no swift stroke at lone France, no dash
eastward to subdue Russia. To-day, when Germany sees how ripe Russia
was then for revolution, the remembrance of that 4th of August must be
the bitterest drop in the deep cup of her regret.
The items at which we have glanced were not all or even the most
important acts of Germany's dawning tragedy. It was not merely that she
revealed herself to the world, but that she revealed herself to
herself. The moving picture of Kultur, of fake idealism, of humaneness,
which she had unreeled before our charitable eyes was stopped, and
stopped forever. The film, exposed momentarily to the flame of truth,
exploded and left on the screen the hideous picture of Germany as she
was. No more sham for a naked nation. In went the unmasked Prussian to
outrage and murder, to bind and burn. When a Government violated its
word to the world, why should the individual check his passions? All
the world, at first unbelieving, watched the procession of horror, and
then, against its wishes, against all the ingrained faith that the long
years had stored within the human breast, the world saw that it was
dealing with nothing less than a monster.
England's day, this? Yes, and a glorious anniversary for her. She has
indeed kept her "solid engagement to do her utmost." In a million
graves are men of the British Empire who did not consider the price at
which the compact would be kept. Their lives for a scrap of paper--and
welcome! When we think that we are winning the war--and nobody denies
that it is American men and food and ships and guns that are winning it
now--let us look back to the 4th of August, 1914, and remember what
nation it was that stood between the beast and his prey, scorning all
his false offers of kindness to Belgium, his promises not to rob
France, and his hypocritical cry of "kindred nation" to the England he
really hated.
But it is not alone England's day. It is the day of the opening of the
world's eyes to the criminality of Prussia. It is the anniversary of
Germany's loss of the war. We--America, France, England, Italy, and the
rest of us--will win it, but Germany lost it herself with the one
stroke at Gemmenich. She believed it a masterpiece of cunning. It was
the foul thrust of a coward and the deliberate mistake of a fool.
_The New York Sun_, August 4, 1918.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] COURTESY OF _THE NEW YORK SUN_
CARRY ON![5]
It's easy to fight when everything's right,
And you're mad with the thrill and the glory;
It's easy to cheer when victory's near,
And wallow in fields that are gory.
It's a different song when everything's wrong,
When you're feeling infernally mortal;
When it's ten against one, and hope there is none,
Buck up, little soldier, and chortle:
Carry on! Carry on!
There isn't much punch in your blow.
You're glaring and staring and hitting out blind;
You're muddy and bloody, but never you mind.
Carry on! Carry on!
You haven't the ghost of a show.
It's looking like death, but while you've a breath,
Carry on, my son! Carry on!
And so in the strife of the battle of life
It's easy to fight when you're winning;
It's easy to slave, and starve and be brave,
When the dawn of success is beginning.
But the man who can meet despair and defeat
With a cheer, there's the man of God's choosing;
The man who can fight to Heaven's own height
Is the man who can fight when he's losing.
Carry on! Carry on!
Things never were looming so black.
But show that you haven't a cowardly streak,
And though you're unlucky you never are weak.
Carry on! Carry on!
Brace up for another attack.
* * * * *
Carry on, old man! Carry on!
There are some who drift out in the deserts of doubt,
And some who in brutishness wallow;
There are others, I know, who in piety go
Because of a Heaven to follow.
But to labor with zest, and to give of your best,
For the sweetness and joy of the giving;
To help folks along with a hand and a song;
Why, there's the real sunshine of living.
Carry on! Carry on!
Fight the good fight and true;
Believe in your mission, greet life with a cheer;
There's big work to do, and that's why you are here.
Carry on! Carry on!
Let the world be the better for you;
And at last when you die, let this be your cry:
Carry on, my soul! Carry on!
ROBERT SERVICE.
[Illustration: A DOG DELIVERING A DISPATCH AT HEADQUARTERS
_Copyright by Western Newspaper Union Photo. Service_]
FOOTNOTES:
[5] COPYRIGHT, BY BARSE AND HOPKINS
WAR DOGS
The story of "The Animals Going to War" tells how, one by one, the wild
creatures, then the enemies of man, were made his friends and learned
to be his helpers. In the World War, the horse has borne man into the
thick of the conflict, the mule has drawn his big guns into place, and
the dog has wonderfully come to his aid, so that now, whenever the
"dogs of war" are let loose, the war dogs go with them.
The Battle of Verdun had been raging for months; Fort Douaumont had
been taken, lost, and finally retaken by the French. The Germans still
poured against it a terrific rain of shot and shell, and within the
battered fortress the guns were disabled and the ammunition nearly
exhausted. Help was needed and needed at once. Long ago the wireless
had been shot to pieces, and the telephones had been destroyed. It was
sure death for a man to venture outside, let alone trying to reach the
lines behind, where he might secure help.
Still the defenders stood firm, and in their hearts, if not with their
lips, over and over they repeated those magic words, "They shall not
pass!" But the shells continued to fall in their very midst, and unless
that battery could be silenced, the fort and all the men in it would be
lost. What could be done when no messenger could reach the lines
behind?