chaplain. He gives graphic and touching pictures of the re-awakening.
“When we are fortunate enough to be able to set up our field chapel,
or to celebrate Mass and Benediction in some church half-destroyed
by the enemy, it is a curious spectacle to see the officers mingled
indifferently with their men ‘waiting their turn.’ No favour is shown
to the commissioned ranks--one chaplain hears the confession, the other
gives Holy Communion. Sometimes when danger is reported too near one
gives Communion that evening... by way of _viaticum_. Sometimes when
the order to advance comes unexpectedly we have to give absolution _en
bloc_ to a whole company ... on condition of subsequent confession
later when the recipient returns... if he does return!”
It is the same with the enemy’s wounded. The Abbé, not without a
gleam of humour, shows himself acting as interpreter between a French
Lutheran minister, who did not know German, and German wounded of his
denomination. “The most scrupulous theologian might perhaps find in my
exhortations certain grammatical faults, but not, I think, any capital
error of dogma.”
Assuredly it is long years since, in the fair plains of France, Mass
was celebrated in such settings of beauty and terror. This is how a
Montmartrois attended it in a village church--
“I was returning with the rest of a fatigue party from digging potatoes
for the company.... With the clay still on my hands I managed to work
my way into a place beside my lieutenant, a commandant, a sergeant, and
some comrades. The elevation had been reached.... And then in the choir
the fresh, clear voices of young girls intoned the canticle: ‘Mary,
Queen of France, protect us!’ My nerves could not bear the tension, and
then ... well, I hid my face in my képi.
“They sang very prettily, the little country maidens, and the three
canticles to Joan of Arc (which I did not know!) were ‘the right thing
in the right place.’... I offered a prayer of thanks to the good God
for having protected me against all dangers.
“The poor old priest... Mass finished, turned round in front of
the altar and said to us in a strangled voice: ‘And now, valiant
soldiers,... go to victory!’”
Or they pray in the open.
“Imagine a very beautiful valley, planted with great trees all
yellowing with autumn, horses tied to every trunk, huts of every kind,
shape, and style, soldiers of all arms: the whole forming a picture of
incomparable dignity.
“The altar was set up against two giant oaks. There were more than a
thousand soldiers present, including the Staff, generals, colonels and
commandants.”
And this is how Cardinal Lucon celebrated his Christmas Mass in a
cellar in bombarded Rheims--
“I shall never forget that Christmas night. The altar was supported on
champagne-cases, and each person assisting had a champagne-case for
a seat. There were present refugees who have nowhere else to sleep,
citizens taking refuge from the shells, and at least 800 soldiers
and officers of all grades. The hymns were sung by a group of fifty
soldiers. They sang all our popular hymns.... It was very impressive;
we seemed to have returned to the Catacombs.”
The Abbé Félicien Laroutzet, second-lieutenant in the 144th of the
Line, paints us still another Mass with a brush steeped in even
stranger colours. He had been permitted to say Mass for the first time
for a month--
“Hardly had I finished the Elevation than a German shell hit the tower
just above the choir, and plunged the church in darkness. Then a
second. It was to be feared that a third would enter by the windows and
shatter the altar to fragments. During the Communion the third shell
arrived. Almost complete darkness ensued, but the altar, the curé, and
myself went untouched. I finished Communion as quickly as possible, and
we escaped.”
This famous encounter, he adds, secured his promotion to the grade of
second-lieutenant.
And so on, and so on. All behind the front; with shells, friendly and
hostile, whistling in a perpetual criss-cross overhead, on improvised
altars; with every idle vanity shrivelled under the scrutiny of death,
the soldiers of France assist humbly at the supreme sacrifice. As
the celebrant raises for adoration the Host, transubstantiated from
bread to the Body of Christ, the buglers lift their instruments, and a
fanfare of spiritual triumph cleaves through the thunder of the guns.
The _Ave Maria_ and the _Stabat Mater_, chanted in stout soldier
voices, are followed by the _Marseillaise_. Thus does France, returned
to her origins, repel the invader of her peaceful land, the ravager of
homes, the profaner of churches.
When we come to the priest-combatants, the _curés sac-au-dos_, the
record is one of stainless and noble heroism. As Mgr. Herscher says, it
would be necessary to invent a new language in order to characterise
justly what have become deeds of every day. It is not in “clerical”
newspapers that the courage of the soldier-priest is enshrined, but in
the columns of the _Journal Officiel_. The Legion of Honour and the
Military Medal have been awarded in numerous instances, and citations
in the Orders of the Day have been still more frequent.
Thus Corporal de Gironde, of the 81st of the Line, receives the
Military Medal for extraordinarily daring patrol work. He is a Jesuit.
The Dominican Corporal Jaméguy rallies, within fifty yards of the
German trenches, a party of five unwounded and eight wounded men who
had been cut off, and leads them all into safety the next day under a
vicious fire. The Abbé Boravalle writes--
“After a very hot day our commandant announced that he was making
recommendations in our company for promotion to the rank of corporal.
Of four recommended, three were priests: I am proud to be one of them.”
Incidents of devoted heroism, in which there is a swift counterchange
between the rôle of soldier and that of priest, are almost innumerable:
certainly no selection can convey a just notion of their abundance. Let
me quote the words of a writer in the _Journal de Genève_, the chief
organ of Swiss Protestantism--
“Observe that there is not a list of those who have fallen on the field
of honour or who are cited in the Order of the Day of the Army in which
you will not find priests. Such a one carried the flag into action;
another, recommended for the Legion of Honour, was killed that very
day; a third, seeing his company waver--he was a lieutenant--leaped to
their head shouting, ‘I am a priest. I do not fear death! Forward! He
recovered the position, but fell riddled with bullets.
“Or we read such stories as this: After the battle, amongst the wounded
and agonising, a soldier not so badly wounded as the rest dragged
himself to an erect position and cried out to the dying: ‘I am a
priest. Receive absolution!’ And he blessed them with his mutilated
hand.”
Take again the testimony of M. Frédéric Masson, a great writer, but no
Catholic--
“What Frenchmen were the first to march? Who gave the example, who went
to death instantly and without a murmur, who merited the epaulettes and
the crosses? The priests.
“There they are with their knapsacks on their backs, and soon the
knapsacks will be off by order of our generals. In this supreme peril
we need officers. And many, for many are being killed. You will see the
priests in command of sections, companies--who knows if you will not
see them in command of regiments if there are any priests left! There
they are all the braver because it is their duty to be tender: _beati
milites_, and if they are a little short in military instruction, which
is easily acquired, one recalls the saying of Bonaparte to Subry--they
have what is not to be acquired: contempt for death, for they are
priests and they believe.”
The superior education of the _prêtre-soldat_, as compared with the
majority of his comrades, gives to his narrative letters a special
value. A seminarist describes a night surprise on a German sentry post--
“I crawl through the mud, stopping for five minutes every three or four
yards... reach the edge of the canal and drop quietly in.... I advance
very slowly, the sentry is not more than ten paces away. But suddenly
my teeth begin to chatter, and I am unable, for all my efforts, to keep
my jaws quiet. Fear? No, cold!... I am obliged to take my handkerchief
and tie it round my head as if I had the toothache....”
He surprises the sentry, chokes him into insensibility, trusses him up,
and crawls back to his men. The reconnaissance completed they return to
their lair in a little wood. They are troubled about the fate of the
sentry.
“My sergeant, my two soldiers, and myself recite a decade of the Rosary
for him. One of the soldiers refused at first to pray for a Boche. It
was necessary to explain a whole heap of theological matters to him
on charity in time of war. He at last consented on condition that we
should say two other decades for our own dear soldiers.... I do not
dare to say that I find pleasure in the work I have to do. But when I
think of our poor France, and of the crimes of these barbarians: if you
knew what they have done!”
So runs the record. Everywhere you find the priest first in danger, and
in abnegation, confessing his comrades in the trenches, then heading
their bayonet-charge; after the battle, his rifle laid aside, he is
whispering consolation into the ear of some poor broken enemy, Pole or
German, launched against civilisation by the bloodthirsty megalomania
of a Prussian Emperor.
I cannot close this paper of random instances without transcribing in
full the story of Sister Julie of Gerbeviller. This is how her name
stands in the _Journal Officiel_--
“By order of the Minister of War to be Chevalier of the Legion of
Honour: Mme. Amélie Rigard, in religion Sister Julie, nurse at the
field hospital of Gerbeviller.”
Appointed by her Superior to this hospital, she remained at her post
during an incessant bombardment in charge of a thousand wounded. She
fed and cared for them, and saved them, by the calm authority of her
manner, from being put to death during the German occupation. Can one
read without a thrill of pride and admiration this glorious salute paid
by soldiers of France to the heroic nun?
On the recapture of Gerbeviller a squadron of _chasseurs_ halts before
the hospital.... The captain asks to see Sister Julie.
“Sister, will you do us a favour? Permit me to parade my soldiers
before you.”
Prevailing with difficulty over her modesty, the captain has his way.
Turning to his squadron, he orders the “Portez lance!”
“Comrades, you remember when we checked the Germans here on August
25th. We saw in this direction huge flames rising up into the heavens.
You see what these flames meant....
“Well in the middle of this evacuated village, under the shells and
bullets, even after the retreat of our heroic infantry who--one against
ten--had held the bridge so long, a woman remained here at the post of
charity attending to the wounded, lavishing her care on all. It was
Sister Julie.
“The President of the Republic has hung on her breast the Cross of the
brave. Salute it!”
So, with swords and lances at the salute, the squadron swept on to
battle.
It is a noble and touching episode, worthy of France, and there were
many such as Sister Julie in the dark days of retreat. Innumerable,
patient, fearless women tended the poilu back to health, won the whole
nation to the height of resolution and confidence from which it now so
confidently confronts the future.
These books are a rich, even an inexhaustible repository of Catholic
heroism. It will be a pity, and a grave loss to the literature of the
war, if they are not made available for English readers. France has
long enough been judged for her sins; it is time that there was some
celebration of her virtues. She has been long enough condemned on a
bill of indictment drafted by her enemies, and would-be conquerors: it
is time that we listened to her speaking for herself. Nor in praising
France do I, or do my fellow-writers, think it necessary to blacken
German Catholicism. Simple, misled, unfree units of the Central Powers
are dying all over Europe at the bidding of two disastrous Emperors:
these plain soldiers, obeying the call of patriotism and deprived of
any true vision of things, are dying in good faith, in our good Faith,
and dying well. But over all the leaders of German Catholicism lies
the red cloud of blood with which the statecraft of their country has
enveloped the world. When they burned Louvain, the barbarians lit a
fire which is not easily to be put out.
THE GOSPEL OF THE DEVIL
I.--BISMARCK
What is the Devil’s Gospel? I take it that the three main articles are
violence, intellect, and a certain malign splendour of domination. If
that is the formula of the Courts of Hell, it is certainly the formula
of Prussianism.
There is here no question of mere instinctive egotism. We are in
presence of an Evangel of Conquest, fully worked out, and completely
conscious of itself. Later in this series we shall have an opportunity
of examining the wild work of some of the Berlin theorists of
blackguardism. But before there was a theory, there was a fact. In
the world of action Prussia had thrown up two huge mountain-peaks of
achievement: Frederick the Great, so grossly flattered by Carlyle,
and Bismarck. Between them yawns that Valley of Purification to which
Jena marks the entrance. For that interregnum of humility Prussia is
truly great: your heart beats with Körner, with Fichte, even with the
cloudy Hegel. But two generations later the type is once more master:
Frederick, reincarnated, calls himself Otto Eduarde Leopold Bismarck
Schönhausen. He is the modern Wotan to whom Germany has built her
altars.
In that curious non-moral mode of writing history for which that German
“moralist,” Carlyle, was chiefly responsible Bismarck was a “great
man.” He changed the map of Europe. He stole Schleswig-Holstein from
Denmark; euchred Austria out of her share of the spoils; and taking,
as his raw materials, the old free German States, the blood of France,
and the imbecile bluff of Napoleon, he produced Modern Germany. Let us
observe the light of idealism in which he worked. It is not literature,
or imagination, or mere phrase-spinning to say that Bismarck made
cruelty his sacrament. I am anxious to make this study as objective and
free from prejudice as possible. It is Bismarck who speaks for himself
in 1849--
“It is desirable and necessary to improve the social and political
condition of Germany; this, however, cannot be brought about by
resolutions, and votes of majorities or speeches of individuals, but by
_blood and iron_.”
If this was Bismarck’s own guiding star, there were others who
recognised it as clearly as himself. When the list of a suggested new
Cabinet was presented to Frederick William IV in just that year, 1849,
he drew a thick line through Bismarck’s name and wrote opposite it in
the margin--
“Red-hot reactionary. Likes the smell of blood. May be employed later
on.”
When employed later on--in France--he did not belie the nostril
diagnosis. I quote from Hoche’s _Bismarck Intime_--
“Apropos of the burnt villages and the peasants who were burnt,
Bismarck remarked that the smell from the villages was ‘like the smell
of roast onions.’ Favre remarked to Bismarck that ladies were to be
seen strolling on the boulevards, and pretty, healthy children were
playing around. ‘You surprise me,’ said Bismarck; ‘I thought you had
already eaten all the children.’
“Favre complained to Bismarck that his soldiers had fired on a
hospital, _L’Hospice des Quinze-Vingts_: ‘Why not?’ he replied. ‘The
French fired on our soldiers who were vigorous and strong.’”
The Prussia, to whose tradition he succeeded, lives in the irony or
indignant protest of the great humanists. I cite but two. “War,” said
Mirabeau, “is the national industry of Prussia.” And Mr. Frederic
Harrison, in a superb essay, published when Germany was hammering at
the gates of Paris in 1870–71, drew out a sound digest of title--
“Prussia is the sole European kingdom which has been built up
province by province on the battlefield, cemented stone by stone in
blood. Its kings have been soldiers; sometimes generals, sometimes
drill-sergeants, but ever soldiers; its people are a drilled nation of
soldiers on furlough; its sovereign is simply commander-in-chief; its
aristocracy are officers of the staff; its capital is a camp.”
He went on to characterise in words that bite deeper since Liége,
Louvain, and Antwerp--
“Unhappily the gospel of the sword has sunk deeper into the entire
Prussian people than any other in Europe. The social system being that
of an army, and each citizen drilled man by man, there is no sign of
national conscience in the matter. And this servile temper, begotten
by this eternal drill, inclines a whole nation to repeat as if by word
of command, and perhaps to believe, the convenient sophisms which the
chief of its staff puts into their mouths.”
His central belief was that power consists in bullying. Had he thought
things over he might, perhaps, have noticed that it costs more strength
to lift a man up than to knock him down. He chose the other way. His
spiritual successors tell you that the meaning of the black, red, and
white of the German tricolour is: “Through night and blood to the
light.” Germany had legitimate ambitions. There are ways of influencing
the world that do not involve war: it was not powder, or bayonets,
or even howitzers that laid Europe in intellectual bondage to Kant.
Bismarck chose the formula of “Blood and Iron.” What it cost he himself
will tell us, speaking out of the shadows and desolation of old age.
The quotation is from Busch, his less discreet Boswell--
“‘There is no doubt, however,’ said Bismarck, ‘that I have caused
unhappiness to great numbers. But for me three great wars would not
have taken place. Eighty thousand men would not have been killed, and
would not now be mourned by parents, brothers, sisters, and widows.’
‘And sweethearts,’ I added somewhat prosaically and inconsiderately.
‘And sweethearts,’ he repeated. ‘I have settled that with God, however.
But I have had little, if any, pleasure from all that I have done,
while on the contrary, I have had a great deal of worry, anxiety, and
trouble.’”
He sought power, and, in seeking it, he had little regard for scraps
of paper. Frederick the Great had taught him that, if a ruler is
sometimes bound to sacrifice his life, he is often bound to sacrifice
his honour to the greatness of the State. Maturely, coldly, with ashes
fallen over all the flames of passion, he tells us in his _Reflections
and Reminiscences_ how he forced on the Franco-German War. There are
versions of the story more vivid and so far more vile. The Ems telegram
has arrived. Bismarck is dining with von Moltke and Roon, and all
three fail to find anything resembling war in it. But the Prince has a
“conviction”--
“Under this conviction I made use of the royal authorisation
communicated to me through Abeken, to publish the contents of the
telegram; and in the presence of my two guests I reduced the telegram
by striking out words, but without adding or altering....
“The difference in the effect of the abbreviated text of the Ems
telegram as compared with that produced by the original was not the
result of stronger words but of the form which made this announcement
seem decisive, _while Abeken’s version would only have been regarded
as a fragment of a negotiation still pending, and to be continued at
Berlin_.
“After I had read out the concentrated edition to my two guests, Moltke
remarked: ‘Now it has a different ring; it sounded before like a
parley; now it is like a flourish in answer to a challenge.’”
Bismarck then explained what he would do with his “concentrated
edition.”
“This explanation brought in the two generals a revulsion to a more
joyous mood, the liveliness of which surprised me. They had suddenly
recovered their pleasure in eating and drinking, and spoke in a more
cheerful vein. Roon said: ‘Our God of old lives still, and will not
let us perish in disgrace.’ Moltke so far relinquished his passive
equanimity that, glancing up joyously towards the ceiling, and
abandoning his usual punctiliousness of speech, he smote his hand upon
his breast and said: ‘If I may but live to lead our armies in such a
war, then the devil may come directly afterwards and fetch away the
“old carcase.”’”
If the God of Roon, the God of falsified telegrams, was the same God
with whom Bismarck “settled matters” regarding his eighty thousand
slain, that strange compact of reconciliation is readily intelligible.
Otherwise, no!
If Bismarck made cruelty his sacrament, in the gross, he was far from
neglecting details. No torch lit a village in France, no finger pulled
a trigger against non-combatants, that was not sped by his counsel. I
first read his words in Belgium as the stories of Liége, and Visé, and
Aerschot, and Louvain poured in--
“True strategy consists in hitting your enemy and hitting him hard.
Above all, you must inflict on the inhabitants of invaded towns the
maximum of suffering, so that they may become sick of the struggle, and
may bring pressure to bear on their government to discontinue it. You
must leave the people through whom you march only their eyes to weep
with.
“In every case the principle which guided our general was that war must
be made terrible to the civil population so that it may sue for peace.”
And when Favre, coming out from the heroic defence of Paris, appealed
to him in name of that “brotherhood which binds the brave of all the
earth,” the Wotan of modern Germany replied--
“‘You speak of your resistance! You are proud of your resistance. Well,
let me tell you, if M. Trochu were a German general, I would shoot him
this evening. You have not the right--do you understand?--in the face
of God, in the face of humanity, for mere military vainglory, to expose
to the horrors of famine a city of two millions.... Do not speak of
your resistance, it is criminal!’”
Abeken, who was called “Bismarck’s Pen,” wrote of his chief--
“Goethe’s saying, ‘Faithful to one aim, even on a crooked road,’ suits
him well.”
Such was the founder of the German Empire, and such the methods by
which he founded it.
II.--NIETZSCHE
It is in no way surprising to find defenders of the calamitous prophet
of Hohenzollernism active to prove that he meant this fine thing,
and that, and did not mean blood and domination. The truth is that
only too many English writers allowed themselves to be tarred with
the Nietzschean brush. They made him a cult, a boom, a pinnacle of
superior vision. Now that the Moloch, whose high priests were beyond
all others Nietzsche and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, is exacting his
awful tribute, the worshippers, once so self-confident, begin to fear a
little for their own reputations. For the issue of this war is to kill
Prussianism, not only in Germany, but in the whole life and philosophy
of Europe. The universal watchword is: “Never again!”
The vogue of the Supermaniacs is, perhaps, best explained by
the curious lack of seriousness in dealing with ideas which is
characteristic of the English mind in its worst periods. Great journals
flatter the Harnacks and the Euckens and the rest in their attempt
to deny all authenticity to the “scraps of paper” on which Christian
belief is founded, and wonder, in the next column, why people are not
going to church. Professor Cramb--who, by the way, is painfully German
in his “anti-German” book--touches upon this inexplicable unreality of
English thought. He suggests that it has counted for much in producing
in Germany that professorial contempt which one finds, especially, in
a writer like Treitschke. When your Prussian says: “Fill me a bath of
blood!” he means blood. When your English critic reads it, he says, too
often: “What a vivid image!”