SWIFT REVERSAL TO BARBARISM
BY VANCE THOMPSON
CULTURE SWEPT AWAY -- BREAKING POINT OF CIVILIZATION -- BARBARISM AND
WOMEN -- AFTER BARBARISM, WHAT?
[The following article is reproduced by the courtesy of the New York
Times.]
There is in Brussels--if the Uhlans have spared it--a mad and monstrous
picture. It is called “A Scene in Hell,” and hangs in the Musée Wiertz.
And what you see on the canvas are the fierce and blinding flames of
hell; and amid them looms the dark figure of Napoleon, and around him
the wives and mothers and maids of Belgium scream and surge and clutch
and curse--taking their posthumous vengeance.
And since Napoleon was a notable emperor in his time, the picture is not
without significance today. Paint in another face, and let it go at
that.
War is a bad thing. Even hell is the worse for it.
War is a bad thing; it is a reversal, sudden and complete, to barbarism.
That is what I would get at in this article. One day there is
civilization, authentic, complex, triumphant; comes war, and in a moment
the entire fabric sinks down into a slime of mud and blood. In a day,
in an hour, a cycle of civilization is canceled. What you saw in the
morning was suave and ordered life; and the sun sets on howling
savagery. In the morning black-coated men lifted their hats to women.
Ere nightfall they are slashing them with sabres and burning the houses
over their heads. And the grave old professors who were droning
platitudes of peace and progress and humanitarianism are screaming, ere
today is done, shrill senile clamors for blood and ravage and rapine.
A reversal to barbarism.
Here; it is in the tea-room of the smartest hotel in Munich; war has
come; high-voiced women of title chatter over their teacups; comes
swaggering in the Crown Prince Ruprecht of Bavaria; he has just had his
sabre sharpened and has girt his abdomen for war. His wife runs to him.
And she kisses the sabre and shouts: “Bring it back to me covered with
blood--that I may kiss it again!” And the other high-voiced women flock
to kiss the sword.
A reversal to barbarism.
It has taken place in an hour; but yesterday these were sweet patrician
ladies, who prattled of humanity and love and the fair graces of life;
and now they would fain wet their mouths with blood--laughingly, as
harlots wet their mouths with wine.
The unclean and vampirish spirit of war has swept them back to the
habits of the cave-dwelling ages of the race. In an hour the culture so
painfully acquired in slow generations has been swept away. Royalty, in
the tea-room of the “Four Seasons,” is one with the blonde nude female
who romped and fought in the dark Teutonic forests ere Caesar came
through Gaul.
Reversal to barbarism.
War is declared; and in Berlin the Emperor of Germany rides in an open
motor car down Unter den Linden; he is in full uniform, sworded, erect,
hieratic; and at his side sits the Empress--she the good mother, the
housewife, the fond grandmother--garmented from head to foot in cloth
the color of blood.
Theatricalism? No. The symbolism is more significant. The symbol bears a
savage significance. It marks, as a red sunset, the going down of
civilization and the coming of the dark barbarism of war.
BREAKING POINT OF CIVILIZATION
There was war; and the whole machinery of civilization stopped.
Modern civilization is the most complex machine imaginable; its infinite
cogged wheels turn endlessly upon each other; and perfectly it
accomplishes its multifarious purposes; but smash one wheel and it all
falls apart into muddle and ruin. The declaration of war was like
thrusting a mailed fist into the intricate works of a clock. There was
an end of the perfected machine of civilization. Everything stopped.
That was a queer world we woke in. A world that seemed new, so old it
was.
Money had ceased to exist. It seemed at that moment an appalling thing.
I was on the edge and frontier of a neutral state. I had money in a
bank. It ceased to be money. A thousand-franc note was paper. A
hundred-mark note was rubbish. British sovereigns were refused at the
railway station. The Swiss shopkeeper would not change a Swiss note.
What had seemed money was not money.
Values were told in terms of bread.
It was a swift and immediate return to the economic conditions of
barbarism. Metals were hoarded; and where there had been trade there was
barter. And it all happened in an hour, in that first fierce panic of
war.
Traffic stopped with a clang as of rusty iron. The mailed fist had
dislocated the complex machinery of European traffic. Frontiers which
had been mere landmarks of travel became suddenly formidable and
impassable barriers, guarded by harsh, hysterical men with bayonets.
War makes men brave and courageous? Rubbish! It fills them with the
cruelty of hysteria and the panic of the unknown. I am not talking of
battle, which is a different thing. But I say the men who guarded the
German frontier--and I dare say every other frontier--in the first
stress of war, were wrenched and shaken with veritable hysteria. At St.
Ludwig and Constance those husky soldiers in iron-mongery, with shaved
heads and beards and outstanding ears, fell into sheer savagery, not
because they were bad and savage men, but simply because they were
hysterical. The fact is worth noting.
It explains many a bloody and infamous deed in the tragic history of sad
Alsace and of little Belgium. The war-begotten reversal to savagery
brought with it all the hysteria of the savage man. The sentries at St.
Ludwig struck with muskets and sabres because they were hysterical with
terror of the new, unknown state into which they had been plunged, not
because they were not men like you and me. Surely the savage Uhlan who
ravaged the cottages of Alsace was your brother and mine, as were the
Magyar beyond the Danube and the Cossack at Kovna. Only they had gone
back to the terrors of the man who dwelt in a cave.
Traffic stopped; and when it stopped civilization fell away from the
travelers. That was strange. Take the afternoon of the day war was
declared, the date being Aug. 1, in the year of our Lord 1914, and the
hour 7.30 P. M., Berlin time. It was the last train that reached the
frontier from Paris. Between Delle and Bicourt lies a neutral zone about
three kilometers--say, nearly two and a half miles--in extent. On one
side France and invasion and terror and war; on the other side of the
zone the relative safety of Switzerland. Six hundred passengers poured
out of the French train at noon into that neutral zone and started to
walk to Swiss safety. A blazing August sun; a road of pebbles and
stinging, upblown dust.
The passengers had been permitted to bring on the train only what
luggage they could carry; so they were laden with bags and coats,
dressing bags and jewel cases--all they had deemed most valuable. Mostly
women. German ladies fleeing for refuge; Russian ladies; English,
American; and a crowd of men, urgent to reach their armies, German,
Swiss, Russian, Austrian, Servian, Italian; withal many of the kind of
American men who go to Switzerland in August.
And the caravan started in the dust and heat of a desert. A woman let
fall her heavy bag and plodded on. Another threw away her coats. Men
shook off their bundles. The heat was stifling. And through the clouds
of dust a panic terror crept. It was the antique terror of the God
Pan--the God All; it was a fear as immense as the sky.
A woman screamed and began to run, throwing away everything she had
safeguarded so she might run with empty hands. A score followed her. Men
began to run. They thrust the women aside, cursing; and ran. And for
over two miles the road was covered thick with coats and bags, with
packages and jewel cases. The greed of possession died out in the
causeless fear.
These hoarse, pushing men, these sweating, shameless women had gone back
10,000 years into prehistoric savagery. Lightly they threw away all the
baubles and gewgaws civilization had fashioned for adorning and
disguising their raw humanity, and the habits of civilization as well.
They had touched but the outermost edge of war, and their very clothes
fell off them.
BARBARISM AND WOMEN
War; and it takes eighty-four hours to make a twelve-hour journey from
the Alps to Paris; the cable is dead; the telegraph is dumb; letters go
only when smuggled over the frontiers by couriers; you look about you
and find you are in a mediæval and mysterious world. You stand amid the
melancholy ruins of canceled cycles. The mailed fist of war has smashed
your world to pieces. You do not know it.
The man you thought of as a brother looks at you with eyes of passionate
hatred; you have eaten bread and salt together; you have drunk together;
you have been uplifted by the same books; you have been sublimed by the
same music; but he is a German, and your blood was made in another land,
and he looks at you with suspicion and hate--perhaps you are a spy. (The
spy mania! Dear Lord, what absurd, bloody, and abominable stories I
could write of this madness which has Europe by the throat, this madness
which is only another form of war hysteria!) A reversal to barbarism;
you and the man who was your friend have gone back to the fear and
hatred of primitive savages, meeting at the corner of a dark wood. All
of humanity we have acquired in the slow way of evolution sloughs off
us.
We are savages once more. For science is dead. All the laboratories are
shut, save those where poison is brewed and destruction is put up in
packages. Education has ceased, save that fierce Nietzschean education
which declares: “The weak and helpless must go to the wall; and we shall
help them go.” All that made life humanly fair is hidden in the fetid
clouds of war where savages (in terror and hysteria) grope for each
other’s throats.
The glory of war--rot! The heroism of war--rot! The scarlet and
beneficent energies of war--rot! When you look at it close what you see
are hulking masses of brutes with fear behind them prodding them on, or
wild and splendid savages, hysterical with hate, battling to save their
hearth fires and women from the oncoming horde. Reversal to barbarism.
Think it over. Upon whom falls the stress of war? Not upon the soldier.
He is killed and fattens the soil where he falls; or he is maimed and
hobbles off toward a pension or beggary--both tolerable things; anyway
he has drunk deep of cruelty and terror and may go his way. By rare good
grace he may have been a hero. In other words, he may have been a
Belgian--which is a word like a decoration, a name to make one strut
like a Greek of Thermopylae--and become thus a permanent part of the
world’s finest history.
* * * * *
I would like to write here the name of a friend, Charles Flamache of
Brussels. He was twenty-one years old. He was an artist who had already
tasted fame. He had known the love of woman. That his destiny might be
fulfilled he died, the blithe, brave boy, in front of Liège. It was the
right death at the right time--ere yet the massed Prussians had rolled
in fire and blood over his fair small land. Wherefore, hail and
farewell, young hero!
* * * * *
But upon whom falls the stress of war?
In a time of barbarism those who suffer are always the weak. War is in
its essence (as said Nietzsche, the German philosopher of “world power”)
an attack upon weakness. The weakest suffer most.
I saw children born on cinder heaps, and I saw them die; and the mothers
die gasping like she dogs in a smother of flies.
Some day the story of what was done in Alsace will be written and the
stories of Visé and Aerschot and Orsmael and Louvain will seem pale and
negligible; but not now--five generations to come will whisper them in
the Vosges.
What I would emphasize is that in the natural state of barbarism induced
by the war the woman falls back to her antique state of she animal. In
thousands of years she has been made into a thing of exquisite and
mysterious femininity; in a day she is thrown back to kinship with the
she dog. Slashed with sabres, pricked with lances, she is a mere thing
of prey.
Surely not the dear Countess and Baroness? Of course not. War is made in
the palaces, but it does not attack the palaces. The worth of every
nation dwells in the cottage; and it is upon the cottage that war works
its worst infamy. Go to Alsace and see.
Pillage, loot, incendiarism, “indemnity”--you can read that in the
records of the invasion of Belgium; that is war; it is all right if war
is to be, for all this talk of chivalrous consideration for foes and
regard for international law is all nonsense; necessity, as
Bethmann-Hollweg said, knows no law, and necessity has always been the
tyrant’s plea; it is the business of a soldier to kill and terrify; if
he restricts his killing and terrifying he is a bad soldier and bad at
his work of barbarism; but--
There is a more sinister side to Europe’s lapse into barbarism. The
women are paying too dear. And to make them pay dear is not really the
business of a soldier, not even a bad soldier. Yet the woman is paying,
God knows. A tragic payment.
AFTER BARBARISM WHAT?
One morning at dawn--it was at Ambérieu--I saw the long trains go by
carrying the German wounded and the German prisoners, who had been taken
in the battles of the Vosges. There were 2,400 taken on toward the
south. There were French nurses with the wounded. I saw water and fruit
and chocolate given to the prisoners.
This was early in the war. The sheer lapse into barbarism had not yet
come. Soon the German newspapers announced:
“Great concern is expressed in press and public utterances lest
prisoners of war receive anything in the line of favored treatment.
Newspapers have conducted an angry campaign against women who have
ventured at the railway station to give coffee or food to prisoners of
war passing through; commanding officers have ordered that persons
‘demeaning themselves by such unworthy conduct’ are to be immediately
ejected from the stations, and in response to public clamor official
announcements have been issued that such prisoners in transport receive
only bread and water.”
And the French followed suit; no “coddling” of prisoners; back to
barbarism, the lessons of humanity forgot and savagery come again.
Civilization in the old world is smashed. I have traversed the ruins;
and my feet are still dirty with mud and blood. But I can tell you what
is going to come out of that welter of ruin. There will come a sane and
righteous hatred of militarism. What will be surely destroyed is
Cæsarism. Prophecy? This is not prophecy; I am stating an assured fact.
Even at this hour of hysterical and relentless warfare there lies deep
in the heart of the democracy of Europe a consuming hatred of
militarism.
Drops of water (or blood) do not more naturally flow into each than did
the English hatred of Cæsarism blend with the high French hatred of the
evil thing; and when the palaces have done fighting, the cottages of
Europe, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and from the Black Sea to
the Hebrides, will proclaim its destruction.
And you will see it; you will see Cæsarism drowned in the very blood it
has shed. And the German, mark you, will not be the least bitter of the
foes of militarism. He will be indeed a relentless foe.
Reversal to barbarism, say you? A shuddering lapse into savagery?
Quite true; that is the state of Europe over the fairest and most highly
civilized provinces. The picture of Sir John French strolling up and
down the battle line smoking a cigarette does not give a fair idea of
it; nor do you get it from the Kaiser on a hilltop surveying his massed
war bullocks surging forth patiently to battle; all that belongs to the
picture books of war.
The real thing is dirtier.