twelve years ago we drank our final Bruderschaft at Innsbruck station.
I was saying good-bye to your Alpenrose, your Rose of the Alps, where
the great mountains spring up their ten and fourteen thousand feet
out of the very pavements, where the Golden Roof glitters over its
antique arcades, where the great bronze warriors guard the sleep of
your Emperor Max, where Andreas Hofer fought the good fight against
an imperial tyrant, where inns, old before the French Revolution, all
but touch gables across the narrow, immemorial _gassen_. You wanted
me to remember all that, but most of all, I think, you wanted me to
remember the quiet valleys, full of colour and peace, the red cupolaed
churches where we went to Mass at four o’clock of a Sunday morning,
the mountains we conquered together, with their summit air that we
thought better than wine, until we came back, leg-weary if heart-high,
in the evening to drink your thin country vintage, and applaud the
zither-players and the amazing Tyrolese dancers. When I was last in
your Tyrol I did not see you, Franz: you had gone to Berlin to study
philology, that characteristic pseudo-science which Nietzsche and your
Prussians have transformed into a seed-bed of criminal philosophies.
Those good days of our youth are worse than dead, a rivulet lost in the
salt sea of estrangement that has engulfed so many friendships and so
much happiness. We have other things to remember. Two years ago your
Austria drove a sword into the heart of Europe. The agony of simple
men then initiated still continues. I wonder where that damnable,
recurrent date found you this midsummer? Fighting against that _Italia
irredenta_ with which you used to sympathise so generously? Falling
back before that Russia which you used to agree with me in regarding
as the chosen home of great novels and profound religion? In the lines
against France, that France which shaped and nourished the soul of
every free soul in Teutondom--and they have not been many--from Heine
to your own tragic Empress? There is another possibility which I had
almost forgotten. No Man’s Land, or, as one had better call it, Dead
Man’s Land, is no great width at the point we hold. Just as I am here
swallowing chalk and clay, consorting with rats and lesser forms of
obscene life, mixing with wounds and blood, so may you be over there.
I look across the long grass, lush with disintegrating corpses, and
imagine that Prussia may have laid hold of you for other pursuits than
philology. Perhaps it is you whose machine-gun taps every night like a
devil-ridden typewriter against this particular area of our parapet?
You will agree with me, even now, that war, if not Hell, is cousin to
it, cousin German. To condemn humanity to pass through that chamber of
torture is a decision so grave and terrible that even emperors might
well tremble before it. In the lineaments of the obscurest man slain
in battle stands written the judgment of the rulers of the earth. Can
your Austria face her conscience? I know that at the question you will
be disposed to parry with a gibe at “English self-righteousness.” But,
as it happens, I am not English, and mere self-righteousness does not
survive the ordeal of battle. Living through this nightmare of blood
you cannot but ask yourself how it began. The diplomatic correspondence
is there to answer the question. These documents, the most memorable in
secular history, are the charter of justification behind every decree
of death that passes from the Allied lines to yours. Your Austria had
grounds, tragical grounds, of complaint against some Serbians: you
sought not justice, but the destruction of Serbian independence. You
leagued yourself with Prussia--that blood-and-iron-monger--to break
the faith of Europe and the homes of Belgium. You have heard all
this before? You will hear it again, till the end of time. Not all
the babbling savants of Berlin can ever erase the record of those
two bully’s blows. They are the Alpha and the Omega of the war. Of
course, it is true that there were other forces behind this reversion
to violence and barbarism. All the explosive sediment of history was
behind it, but it was your touch on the trigger that released all that
imprisoned damnation.
Your natural place was not with Prussia. You, who were once the master,
are now the valet of Germanism. You had not elaborated through forty
years a religion of murder. Like us Irish, you were perhaps more
fascinating than successful; you were a nation of gentlemen. You had
grace, delicacy and honour. You listened to the crowned commercial
traveller from Potsdam, who promised you a short war and a golden
guerdon of trade. We know now that it was he who forced your hand in
the Serbian negotiations. To be allured by such a bribe is no new
sin in our experience; every nation of the Alliance, at some time or
other in the bad past, has fallen in similar wise. Does it seem to you
that Mephistopheles is in the way of keeping his promise? I notice in
your newspapers that your people are impressed by the area of enemy
territory you occupy. The present truth of the military situation is
that you occupy only as a detected burglar “occupies” the house he has
attempted to rifle--that is to say, pending the arrival of the police.
And, Franz, the police, although as usual somewhat slow, have arrived.
There is no doubt of that.
It seems to me quite candidly that the time has come to separate
Habsburg from Hohenzollern. We are willing to believe that you acted
under duress. During the war you have not befouled your name beyond
forgiveness: no Cavell or Fryatt looms up in judgment against you.
Your base and cynical over-lord, having compelled you to a gamble in
blood, now begins to exhibit the nakedness of soul of every cut-throat
cut-purse who finds that he has caught a Tartar. I do not know that any
deep hatred of Austria is nourished by anyone in the Allied countries
who understands the inner economy of the Central Empires. A _locus
pœnitentiæ_ will not be refused you. Come back to the civilisation to
which you belong. Make it possible for me once again to renew our old
Bruderschaft in Innsbruck, and to rejoice together that the Twilight of
the Gods of Cruelty has deepened into enduring night.
SILHOUETTES FROM THE FRONT
I.--THE WAY TO THE TRENCHES
They have a saying among the followers of Mohammed, “Shun him who has
thrice made the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Holy City! His conversation
is an offence.” It is, indeed, the vice of travellers that they will
talk. No man is safe from us if only we have been anywhere he has not
been--from Birr, as the song says, to Bareilly. But the temptation
of the trenches is the most formidable of all. Who has resisted it?
Raw and ripe we have each of us tried to daub his own picture of
that amazing fact, of the strange shifts and incredible devisings to
which civilised nations have been forced to resort in order to save
civilisation. One brush will add a stroke that escapes another. All
the brushes and books, and all the cinema films together will never
come near the reality. That is the sole rationale of these thumb-nail
silhouettes.
If you were to ask any patron of the present Continental tour for
his first impression, he would probably note the excellence of the
travelling arrangements. Tickets are free, or rather they are not
necessary. It is impossible to miss your train: the columns of them
thunder without haste and without rest from the remotest station back
at home to the ultimate railhead where their thunder dies in that of
the guns. The sea-lacunæ are obliterated by an all but unbroken bridge
of untorpedoed transports. Delays due to loss of luggage are unknown.
You may, indeed, lose your luggage, but you do not delay. There are no
tips on this journey, and it would be idle to book seats in advance.
An avoidable expense, for you will get there without them. Either with
a draft, a post of minor importance but yet of some; or with your
battalion in all the pomp and circumstance of war; or, likely enough,
in these latter days as an isolated officer reinforcement with a typed
telegram and a moving order, you will arrive. Of course there are
incidental divagations. With traffic rigidly scheduled and regulated as
it must be, an occasional traveller is to be found who has lost his way
and has perhaps accomplished ten kilometres between dawn and dusk. I
met one such, and said--
“You seem to have lost your unit?”
“Lost my unit?” he replied with intense rancour. “I have lost my
company, lost my battalion, lost my brigade, lost my division,
my corps. A little more and I shall have lost the b----y British
Expeditionary Force.”
Indubitably it is the perfection of transportation. Napoleon said,
or is supposed to have said, that an army, like a snake, moves on
its belly. The truth is, of course, that the art of war is, as to
six-sevenths of it, the art of carrying heavy things from one place
to another. You have got to move obvious necessaries, such as food and
fuel and housing-timber and spare clothes; and human frames--that to
marching men are heavier at the end of a long day than anything in the
world; and rifles, bayonets and bombs, the ultimate _ratio decidendi_
of all operations; and shells that look like death, and weigh as much
as a model bungalow; and frowning Frankensteins of guns that look like
the Day of Judgment, and weigh as much as a small foundry; and the
wounded who come back with the Cross, steeped in blood, to stand as a
fit symbol of their sacrifice. But you must move a great deal that is
less obvious and more necessary. When you export an army such as ours,
which is in reality a nation and not a small one, you must send with
it a government. Now knowledge, and the administrative body in which
it expresses itself, is of all things the most difficult to export.
This scheme of transportation is the first miracle of sheer brain-power
that strikes you, but it is not the greatest. I do not scruple to say
that as a study in government, that is to say, in the efficient conduct
of human things in the mass, the present army, as organised through
G.H.Q., is far more impressive than most civil constitutions.
I do not speak merely of the actual Higher Command. Your heads of that
must carry all the apparatus of all its range from minor tactics to
military statesmanship. Note, rather, then, when you send an army you
must send a Treasury, a General Post Office, a Judiciary and Record
Office, and one hardly knows what beside. Your quartermaster-general
has got to be the Selfridge of six million gaily grumbling customers,
who are perpetually on the move. A mere battalion quartermaster must
possess qualities that would win a fortune in a large suburban shop.
And it is possible to overlook the service of information--the
signallers. Everywhere the army goes it lays behind it a tentacular
network of news-carrying wire. The arm of its reporting power is
indefinitely longer than that of any Associated Press. From the company
dug-out in the front trench to Sir Douglas Haig, and from him to
Whitehall, there is no gap. On the earth, beneath it and above, this
nerve-system extends: aeroplane, observation balloon, patrol, vedette,
sniping-post, all collect their varying toll of fact and surmise;
electricity, drilled to the use of the men who wear the blue-and-white
bands, vibrates it on to its destination. And so is this particular
area of the army cerebrum kept alive and alert. I have hardly spoken
of the A.S.C., of the endless chain of supply that for ever runs and
returns on its infallible cogs about the roads and railways.
There are other, many other, things to admire as patterns of
organisation. It is what our subalterns, with their strict and shy
economy of speech, describe as a “great show.” All the world has heard
of carrying on. But it was first of all necessary to carry. And we have
carried to war across the seas not a mere army, but a people in arms.
II.--THE LONG ENDURANCE
In the history of war, especially as it was practised by the Irish
regiments, we have been accustomed to the brief ecstasy of assault,
the flash of bayonets, the headlong avalanche of death and victory....
Often there had been, before this sharp decision, the heroism of a long
march. But in general, instantaneity had been the characteristic of
Irish soldiers as it is of Irish football forwards. There are instances
enough of the old quality in this war from Festubert to Suvla Bay, from
Loos to that shell-powdered sinister terrain over which the Ulster
Division swept in its great charges. But there is another heroism. The
three chapters of this war may well bear for rubrics: the Grim Retreat,
the Long Endurance, the Epic Push. It is of the second that I write
here.
Note that this, the greatest, is also the dullest of all recorded
campaigns. It is wrong, indeed, to call it a campaign or even a series
of campaigns: one had better style it the Wall-paper War. Everywhere
the same type and development of fighting, the same pattern repeated
and indefinitely repeated. It is true that the walls are the walls of
the world, and the colours are those of life and death. None the less
the effect on the mind is that of near bigness, which is always of its
nature wearisome. It is not of that weariness of the detached mind
that I now write, but of the more intimate and crushing fatigue of the
actual man on the spot. There may very well be units of this immense
army that on their return home will have apparently little to show for
their lost blood.
People will say to them--
“I suppose you were in the dash at X? No? Oh, it was the capture of Y?
I mean, of course, the round-up at Z?”
And they will answer rather dully--
“No. We just held on. We are the lot that just stuck to A, and weren’t
shifted out of B.”
And the response will be a disappointed and belittling “Oh yes!”
But, when it is understood, this long endurance will be seen to be
something very notable in itself, and, more than that, an essential
element in the slow and great victory. Movements are picturesque, but
in order that something should move it was necessary that something
should stand still. The ends of a lever move effectively only when it
is based on an unmoving fulcrum. If the rivet of a scissors did not
stand fast, the blades would cut little. And the tale of the units to
whom it came merely to hold the line is the great tale.
In the trenches it is the day-by-dayness that tells and tries. It
is always the same tone of duty: certain days in billets, certain
days in reserve, certain days in the front trench. One is reminded of
those endless chains by which some well-buckets are worked, except
that nothing or very little ever seems to come up in the bucket to
pay the labour of turning. General Joffre as grignotard is one of
the phrase-makers of the war. But this nibbling process works both
ways. We nibble; they nibble. They are nibbled; we are nibbled. A few
casualties every turn, another grating of the saw-teeth of death and
disease, and before very long a strong unit is weak. And, of course,
the nerve-strain is not slight. Everybody going up to the trenches
from the C. O. down to the last arrival in the last draft knows it to
be moral certainty that there are two or three that will not march
back. Everybody knows that it may be anybody. In the trenches death
is random, illogical, devoid of principle. One is shot not on sight,
but on blindness, out of sight. You feel that a man who is hit has had
worse luck than a golfer whose opponent holes out in one at a blind
hole. Yet these things do happen. Very few people are hit by lightning,
and in a storm it is a comfort to remember this. But some people are
hit by lightning. Here one is in a place where a very trivial piece of
geographical bad luck may be fatal. There is much to nibble the nerves.
One likes to image this whole task of holding the line under the image
of a sentry-group. This is not to depreciate any other man or any other
function. From colonel down all the world here has the same job. The
sentry-group is the symbol. A figure in khaki stands on the shelf of
fire-bag, his steel helmet forming a serious bulge over the parapet
as he peers through the night towards the German lines. His comrade
sits on the shelf beside him waiting to help, to report, to carry the
gas-alarm, the alarm of an attack. Over there in front across No Man’s
Land there are shell-holes and unburied men. Strange things happen
there. Patrols and counter-patrols come and go. There are two sinister
fences of barbed wire, on the barbs of which blood-stained strips of
uniform and fragments more sinister have been known to hang uncollected
for a long time. The air is shaken with diabolical reverberations;
it is stabbed with malign illumination as the Véry lights shoot up,
broaden to a blaze, and go out. This contrast of night and light and
gloom is trying to the eyes. The rifle-grenades and trench-mortars,
flung at short range, that scream through the air are trying to the
ears. They may drop a traverse away, and other men not charged for the
moment with his duty may seek shelter. But not he. Strange things issue
from No Man’s Land, and the eyes of the army never close or flinch. And
so, strained, tense and immovable he leans and looks forward into the
night of menace.
But the trench has not fallen. As for him, he carried his pack for
Ireland and Europe, and now pack-carrying is over.
He has held the line.
III.--RHAPSODY ON RATS
What first strikes one in a trench is, contrary to report, not the Rat
but the Slat. A trench-board is a sort of ladder, laid horizontally
along a ditch of ill repute, and the rungs of this ladder are the
slats. It is true that if this ladder were set upright it would
be impossible to climb it, for the slats are too close together.
Nevertheless, it has the form and aspirations of a ladder, and yearns
towards the vertical. To follow the windings of the trench, this
board is of necessity made in short sections. Now, one often enters a
trench in the dark. Certain short boards have been displaced by the
outgoing unit. An incautious foot, with, say, fifteen stone avoirdupois
behind it, is set on one end, and the perpendicular ambition of the
trench-board manifests itself in a jarring wallop of the other end on
one’s tin hat. The slat decidedly strikes you.
It is unpleasant to walk on, as anybody who has ever laboriously evaded
coal-cellar gratings will realise. It exists in numbers that have never
been counted. You can walk from the North Sea to the foot-hills of the
Alps with the soles of your boots continuously beslatted, save where
there is an odd broken board which there has not been time to repair.
At the end of the war there will probably be slat-excursions organised
by American tourist companies--they are said to have already purchased
the ground--with the privilege to each pilgrim of removing one slat
as a souvenir. What is to be said for them is that they stand between
you and a flounder along the bottom mud. In winter, when the drainage
improvisations prove false, and the fighting ditches run hip-high, the
foothold is to be valued. And now as to the rats.
Ratavia, as one may designate it, resembles China in that there has
never been a census of its population, but that it approximates to the
mathematical infinite. They are everywhere--large rats, small rats,
bushy rats, shy rats and impudent, with their malign whiskers, their
obscene eyes, loathsome all the way from overlapping teeth to kangaroo
tail. You see them on the parades and the shelter-roofs at night,
slinking along on their pestiferous errands. You lie in your dug-out,
famished, not for food (that goes without saying), but for sleep,
and hear them scurrying up and down their shafts, nibbling at what
they find, dragging scraps of old newspapers along, with intolerable
cracklings, to bed themselves. They scurry across your blankets and
your very face. Nothing suppresses their numbers. Not dogs smuggled in
in breach of regulations. Not poison, which most certainly ought not to
be used. Not the revolver-practice in which irritated subalterns have
been known to indulge. Men die and rats increase.
I see just one defence that they can make: it was not they who invaded
our kingdom, but we who invaded theirs. We descended, we even dug
ourselves down to their level. It is true that in our heroic moments
we may style the trenches the New Catacombs to which freedom descended
for a while to return in triumph. But it is also true that they are
rat-holes, rat-avenues, rat-areas. The dramatic translation of an
old period was called “The Birds”; the dramatisation of this must be
called “The Rats.” Strangely enough, it has been left for me to tell
the decisive chapter of the inner history of the war. Kaiser Wilhelm,
whose resemblance to a rat has been too little noticed--you have but to
take the wax out of his moustache and allow it to droop--was seated in
his ugly palace at Potsdam, considering his ultimatum to Serbia, when
there suddenly appeared before him, down the chimney or out of some
diplomatic orifice in the panelling, a Rat, the master and pattern of
all rats. “Majesty!” said he, “I am come to offer you my aid in this
war which you are planning. As you are the Emperor of all the Germans,
so am I the Emperor of all the Rats. Our interests coincide.”
They conferred together very shrewdly, and struck an alliance.
“Good!” said his Majesty, slapping his thigh. “It is decided. We are
with-one-another-firmly-united. The war will begin forthwith.”
So the great quintessential Super-Rat, the Rattish _Ding an sich_, left
to mobilise his forces, and the Kaiser drew over a sheet of paper and
wrote the magical and black word that unlocks Hell. And the great rat
called in his Austria, which is the louse, and his Turkey, which is the
sand-flea, and his Bulgaria, which is that porter of poison, the fly.
So the battle was joined between the clean and the obscene.
It must be said for the Kaiser that with this one ally he kept faith.
Ratavia has increased enormously in population and prosperity. It has
suffered from no menace of famine, for Wilhelm, the faith-keeper, has
even sacrificed his own subjects generously in order to avert that
calamity.
But the end is not yet. The Emperor of the Rats will come once again to
Potsdam.
“Majesty!” he will say. “I am a student of Treitschke, who teaches that
an alliance is to be kept by the stronger of two associates only as
long as his profit lies that way.” And as Majesty, shrivelled, decaying
with the pallor of death on him, trembles in his chair the Great Rat
will add--
“I propose to annex you.”
THE NEW FRANCE
Madame Caillaux, who was formerly an actress, has achieved in real
life her most remarkable dramatic success. Like Emerson’s Lexington
farmer, she has certainly fired a shot heard round the world. The
assassination of a great political editor by the wife of a powerful
minister has recalled to us in a lurid flash the monstrous vanities and
violences that raven behind the polite exterior of civilisation. It
has given a good many other editors a peg on which to hang a new array
of reproachful platitudes. But its effect on the immediate course of
politics in France is likely to be of trivial importance. There will be
a loud momentary splash, and a wide-going rush of ripples, but it will
be found to have been no more than a stone flung into a river already
swollen and hurrying to an ambiguous issue. Personal scandals and
tragedies are not allowed to disturb that battle of ideas which is the
essential life of the Republic. It will be noted that Madame Caillaux’
automatic pistol did not purchase for her husband a respite of even
twenty hours. The day following, M. Barthou brought the attack into
the Chamber to a head by reading the letter of M. Fabre, the Public
Prosecutor; the Rochette enquiry has been not delayed, but expedited,
and the electoral struggle comes on with even more headlong rapidity.
Making all discount for the error of vision, characteristic of the
foreign observer, we are able to say with assurance that the programmes
submitted for the approaching election mark the most serious attempt
made since the war of 1870 to re-establish France in her traditions.