grave. I hadn’t the foggiest idea where it was, but after lunch we set out in
search of it. At last we found it in a shady backwater of the Inner Temple—a
simple slab on which the only inscription was the name, “Oliver Goldsmith.” I
know of only one parallel to this for illustrious brevity; a gravestone in
Paris, from which even the Christian name is omitted and on which the solitary
word “Heine” is written. I liked to see the poet from Broadway bare his head
as he stood by the long-dead English poet’s grave. Behind us in the Temple
chapel the confident soprano of boys’ voices soared. It was a grey-blue day,
made tawny for brave moments by fugitive stabs of sunshine. Lime trees dappled
the cold courtyard with shadows; leaves drifted down like gilded largesse. Old
men, with dimming eyes and stooped backs, shuffled from stairway to stairway,
carrying heavy ledgers. The rumble of Fleet Street reached us comfortingly,
like the sound of distant surf on an unseen shore. My thoughts wrenched
themselves free from the scenes of blood and struggle in which I participated
less than two weeks ago. Here, in that simple inscription, was the symbol of
the one quality which survives Time’s erasures—character which loved and won
love intensely.
Queer letters you get from me! I write the way I feel from London or the
battlefield. My room-mate is lying in bed, his poor shattered leg propped up
on a pillow and a cheery smile about his lips. In the well of the hospital
someone is playing—playing love-songs as though there were no war. The music,
muted by distance, drifts in to me through the open window. I feel that life
is mine again; I can hope. At the Front to hope too much was to court
disappointment. To be alive is thrilling and delicious.
LXXIX
London October 6, 1918
It is Sunday morning. As I write the newsboys in the Strand are calling an
extra-special. Before entering the Savoy for lunch I purchased a copy, which I
read as I sat in the great gold and crimson lounge while I waited for a table.
You know what the Savoy is like, crowded with actresses, would-be-taken-for
actresses, officers on leave, chaps hobbling out of hospitals like myself, and
a sprinkling of Jews with huge noses and a magnificent disregard for the fact
that they are not in khaki. The orchestra was being kept up to the right pitch
of frenzy in their efforts by a gentleman who is reported to get in more extra
beats to the minute than any other person of his colour in London. The feet of
the girls tripped into an unconscious one-step as they entered, as though they
acted independently of their owners. At the end of the rather pompous hall,
with its false air of being too respectable for naughtiness, lay the terrace
and beyond that the Thames, benevolent and drowsy in the October sunshine.
Everything was gay and normal as though nothing except the war had happened or
would ever happen. I should like Berlin to have seen us—Berlin which waited
breathless for the detonation of the latest Big Bertha which she had fired on
the world.
I opened my paper. Across the top of it, in one-inch type headlines, ran the
message:
GERMANY PLEADS FOR PEACE
I am sorry to have to disappoint Germany, but the truth is I didn’t blink an
eyelid or turn a hair. I was scarcely mildly interested. I gazed round the
crowd; their eyelids had not blinked and their hair had not turned. The
Kaiser’s Big Bertha of peace had not roused them; she must have fired a dud.
Everyone looked quite contented and animated, as if the war was going to last
for ever.
My eye slipped down the two columns of close printing in which the mercy of
the All Highest was revealed to the world. I learnt that the All Highest’s new
Imperial Chancellor was celebrating his new office by playing a little trick
on his own credulity; he was pretending that by Christmas Germany would have
sponged out all her debts of infamy with words. Prince Max of Baden was in
such a hurry to bring good-will upon earth that he had cabled to President
Wilson proposals for a lasting peace; he had gone to this trouble and expense
not because of anything that was happening on the Western Front, but solely
“in the interests of suffering humanity.” Glancing at a parallel column I read
words which would have led me to doubt the sincerity of any one less august:
“Germans Defeated in All-day Battle. Tanks do Great Execution among Hun
Infantry. 1000 Prisoners Taken.”
Then I turned back to see what this spokesman of a nation of humanitarians had
to say for himself. I learnt that Germany had always been keen on the League
of Nations: that she was anxious, as she had always been anxious, to
rehabilitate Belgium; that her armies were still invincible, and that the
Western Front was still unbroken; that the Kaiser was God’s latest revelation
of His own perfection and His magnanimous shadow upon earth.
Liars! Blasphemous liars! How can one treat with a nation which has not even
the sense to make its shamming decent and plausible? On the Western Front
to-day in their ignominious retreat the Germans are showing their ancient
ferocity for destruction. I know, for I have just come from before Cambrai.
Cities are being levelled before they make their exit; civilian populations
are being carried away captive; trains piled high with loot precede their
departure; they leave behind them the desolation of death. While with
“incomparable heroism” their armies are executing these brutalities, their
Chancellor recalls us to a lost humanity and presupposes that we shall accept
his professions at their face value.
I looked up from my paper at the Sunday crowd, chatting gaily as it passed
through gaudy splendours into lunch. They were amazingly unmoved by anything
that the German Chancellor had said. So far as their attitude betrayed them,
he might never have become Chancellor. If I may state the case colloquially,
they didn’t care a damn. There were American officers newly landed, men with
the Mons ribbon, who had been in the game from the crack of the first gun,
wounded Johnnies like myself, wearing the blue armlet which denotes that you
are still in hospital. One and all were seizing this jolly moment before they
again caught sight of the trenches and carried on with pounding the Hun. They
weren’t going to spoil their leisure by discussing the perturbations of a
German Chancellor.
Peace! For the Hun there shall be no peace. For him, for the next hundred
years, whether we fight him or guard the wall which we shall build about him,
there will be no peace. We, who have seen the mud of France grow red with
blood as if with poppy petals, will never forget. That we die is nothing,
provided always that two German lives pay for our death. Beyond the Rhine,
Germany lies intact; her towns are still snug and smiling. One journeys to
them through a hundred miles of rotting corpses—the corpses of men who were
our friends; yet the Imperial Chancellor appeals to our humanity and reminds
us of mercy.
Mercy! While I have been in hospital several batches of returned British
prisoners have arrived. I have sat at table with them, seen their neglected
wounds, and talked to them. One officer, in addition to his battlefield wound,
has a face horribly disfigured. I scarcely know how to describe it. His jaw
has been broken; his entire face has been pushed to one side. It was done by
the butt of a Hun rifle in a prison hospital in Germany; an orderly woke him
up by smashing his face in one morning as he lay in bed. You may say that this
was the act of one man and cannot justly be taken as representative of a
nation. The time has long gone by for such generous discriminations; in four
years of warfare these ferocious cruelties have been too frequent and
organized for their odium to be borne by individual men. When Germany speaks
of mercy it is as though a condemned murderer on the scaffold appealed for his
reprieve on the grounds of Christ’s commandment, “Love thy neighbour as
thyself.” Bullies grow fluent at quoting scripture only when they feel the
rope about their necks; their use of scripture phrases at the eleventh hour is
proof of cowardice—not of repentance.
Judas, the front-rank assassin of all times, set an example in decency which
it would behove Germany to follow, when he went out into the garden and hanged
himself.
There will be sentimentalists among the Allies who will speak of forgiveness
and softer judgments. Their motives will be mixed and many: some will be
camouflaged pacifists; some will be influenced by personal advantages, such as
relations, business affiliations and financial investments in Germany; some
will be war-weary mothers and wives who will pounce on the first opportunity
of regaining their remaining men. None of them will be the men who have done
the fighting. Germany has turned to the American President as the intercessor
for Peace; the men at the Front look to America to back them up in exacting
the final penalty—they look to America above all the other Allies for firmness
for the reason that she is not war-weary, and because millions of her men who
are in khaki have yet to prove their manhood to themselves. America beyond all
Germany’s adversaries came into the war on indisputably righteous grounds: we
look to her to insist on a meticulously righteous settlement. In the face of
the enormities which have been perpetrated by the Hun armies from the first
violation of Belgium’s neutrality up to now, no vengeance could be made
adequate. The entire history of Germany’s method of making war is one of an
increasing ingenuity in devising new methods of making nations suffer while
withholding the release of death. The ravishing of women, the shooting of old
men, the sending of the girlhood of occupied territories into the shame of
unwilling prostitution, the wholesale destruction of all virtues that make
life decent and desirable cannot be exacted as part of our penalty; but the
extermination of the arch-culprits who have educated their human instruments
out of manhood into bestiality can. If the Kaiser and the herd of human
minotaurs who surround him escape the gallows, justice becomes a travesty and
there is no murderer, however diabolical his atrocities, who deserves to be
electrocuted.
With the turning of the tide in the Allies’ favour the voice of France is
already making itself heard on the side of the argument for vengeance. Whoever
forgets, France has her landscapes billowed into mire by shells, her gallant
cities converted into monstrous blots of brick and dirt, always to remind her.
She is demanding that for every French city laid low, a German city, when the
day of settlement comes, shall suffer an equal nemesis. For these crimes
against civilian rights and properties, Germany has no martial motive. They
are wanton and carried out by organized incendiaries among her retreating
armies, having no provocation of battle to excuse them. Moreover, as Dr. Hugh
Bellot, the eminent International lawyer, has pointed out, Germany has
condemned herself out of her own mouth. In her treatment, for instance, of
such a city as St. Quentin, she commits three separate crimes against
International law. First, against the person of the civilian; second, against
the rights of movable property; third, against the rights of public and
private property. In her own military manual, known as the German War Book,
and regarded as her official guide for military conduct until this present
war, she lays down that “the devastation of occupied territory, destruction of
property, carrying away of inhabitants into bondage or captivity, and the
right of plundering private property, formerly permitted, can no longer be
entertained. The inhabitants are no longer to be regarded, generally speaking,
as enemies, and are not to be molested in life, limb, honour or freedom.”
Furthermore it states that “every insult, every disturbance against the
domestic peace, every attack on family honour and morality, every unlawful and
outrageous attack or act of violence, are just as strictly punishable as
though they had been committed against the inhabitants of one’s own land.”
There is not a single one of the above rulings that Germany is not violating
at this moment in her enforced withdrawal from France; and it is at this time
that her Chancellor appeals for peace in “the interests of suffering
humanity.” Magnanimity! It is a fine, large-sounding word and one which it
would be a disgrace to lose from our vocabulary; yet it is a word capable of
much abuse if employed in our peace dealings with the enemy. The day for
magnanimity has long gone by; in being magnanimous we are unjust to both our
future generations and our valiant dead. There are deeds of such vileness and
treachery that they put nations, equally with individuals, outside the pale of
all possible magnanimity. For four years Germany has figured in history as a
self-applauded assassin. While the rôle seemed to pay her, she gloried in her
ruthlessness. She succeeded too well both on sea and land ever to persuade us
that defeat has made her heart more tender. The only peace terms will be a
carefully audited reckoning of all the happiness and innocence that she has
strangled. That this may be accomplished the man at the Front is willing to go
on risking life and sanity for twice four years, if need be: in the certainty
that it will be accomplished, he will die without regret.
We British and men of the Dominions did not always feel this way. When we
entered the war we determined to remain gentlemen whatever happened. We
weren’t going to be vulgar and lose our tempers; we weren’t going to be
un-sportsmanly and learn to hate. Though dirty tricks were played on us, we
would still play fair. Our code of honour demanded it. There should be no
retaliation. Then came the Germans’ employment of gas, his flame attacks, his
submarining of merchantmen, his bombing of hospitals and civilian towns. You
can’t play fair with an enemy who flies the flag of truce that he may shoot
you in the back. Tit for tat was the only code of honour which came within the
comprehension of such a ruffian. It took three years for us to stoop to the
bombing of the Rhine towns. The wisdom of the step has been proved; the
children of London now sleep safely in their beds. In my opinion, at least in
as far as the British armies are concerned, the success of the present
offensive has just one meaning: after four years of gallant smiling our
soldiers have attained a righteous anger—a determination to exact a just
revenge. They no longer make lenient discriminations between Germany and her
rulers. They know now that the breath of every individual German is tainted
with the odour of carnage. What makes our anger more bitter is the shame that
Germany should have forced us to stoop to hatred as a weapon. But there is
only one safe principle upon which to act in dealing with Germany, whether in
fighting her or making peace with her: With whatever measure she metes, it
should be measured to her again. Brute force is the only reasoning she
understands.
The Imperial Chancellor has appealed for peace “in the interest of suffering
humanity.” Even in his cry for mercy he speaks vaingloriously, boasting of the
“incomparable heroism” of his mob of brutes who have made humanity suffer.
In not one line of his appeal is there a hint of polite regret. By the time
you read this letter, this particular peace overture will be ancient history,
but there will be many more of them, each one more sentimental and frantic as
our armies batter their way nearer to Germany’s complacent smiling towns. As
these peace overtures arrive, as they will almost daily, there is a saying of
Richard Hooker’s which I wish every American would repeat night and morning as
a vow and prayer. It is a saying which was in my mind on the dawn of 8th
August, when we sailed out into the morning mist on the great Amiens attack.
It is a saying which was unconsciously in the mind of every British soldier;
its stern righteousness explains our altered attitude and the Cromwellian
strength with which we strike. “Lord, I owe thee a death,” said Richard
Hooker. Whether we be soldiers or civilians, we each one owe the Lord a Hun
death for the accumulated horror that has taken place. Such blasphemies
against God’s handiwork cannot be wiped out with words. To make peace before
the Hun has paid his righteous debt, is to shorten God’s right arm and to make
sacrifice seem trivial. We are not fighting to crush individuals or nations,
but against a strongly fortified vileness and to prove that righteousness
still triumphs in the world. If at the first whimpering our hearts are touched
and we allow the evil to escape its punishment, it will sneak off with a
cunning leer about its mouth to lick its wounds into health that it may take a
future generation unawares. Mercy at this juncture would be spiritual
slovenliness. God has given the Allies a task to accomplish; He has made us
His avengers that, when our work is ended, He may create a new heaven upon
earth.