_July 11._—Set out with the Child, two sergeants, and my trusty

‘look-out man’ to look for a more favourable spot. After a good

deal of walking about found one, a fairly snug place (though

pitted with shell holes).

Intended to reconnoitre for an O.P. in the front edge of

Mametz Wood, but met a colonel just back from those parts who

assured us that the enemy front line ran there. Reluctantly (!)

we abandoned the enterprise and returned. At 6 P.M. the Child

started off with a digging party to prepare the new position.

Move of the battery ordered for 9.30, then postponed till

10.30. Road crowded with infantry and transport; progress slow.

To be mounted and at the head of a column of twelve six-horse

teams is a very different thing from being alone and ready to

slip behind a wall or into a trench if occasion calls for it.

Luck was on our side, however, and we got through before any

shells came.

Occupied the position quickly, emptied the ammunition wagons,

and got the horses clear without casualties. The Child reported

that a few four-twos had come pretty close while he and his

party were digging and had stopped their work for a while:

nevertheless, quite a lot already done. Time now 12.30. Turned

on every available man and continued digging till dawn. Men

very beat, but not a word of grousing.

_July 12._—At dawn went up to find a new O.P.: took the Child

and two signallers, the latter laying a wire as they went.

Found excellent place with good general view in an old German

redoubt. Trenches, however, crammed with sleeping infantry,

over whom one had to step, and under whom the signallers had

to pass their line! Thick mist till 8 A.M., when light became

good enough to start on our task, which was to cut through the

wire at a certain spot in the German main second line north

of Mametz Wood. Observation difficult, as we were rather far

back and the whole line was being heavily bombarded by our

‘heavies.’ About 10.30 what was apparently an excursion party

of generals and staff officers arrived to see the fun, crowded

us out of our bay in the trench and lined up, with their heads

and red hat-bands exposed. Lay down in a corner and tried

to sleep, but got trodden on so abandoned the idea. Shoon

(another of my youthful subalterns) came up to relieve us at

2.30, so the Child and I returned to the battery and got about

three hours’ sleep. The detachments with amazing industry and

endurance again hard at work digging. A good deal of hostile

fire all round us, especially close to the nullah, but nothing

within 200 yards of the guns.

About 5.30 P.M. Shoon rang up from the O.P. to say that he

and a signaller had been wounded. Angelo went up to take his

place. Poor old Shoon, when he arrived down, was pretty shaken.

Evidently the crowd of spectators previously remarked upon had

attracted the attention of some cross Boche gunner. A five-nine

dropped just beside the O.P. and knocked both signallers and

Shoon, who was observing his wire-cutting at the moment, head

over heels back into the trench below. While they were picking

themselves up out of the débris a salvo landed on the parados

immediately behind them. One signaller was untouched (and

rescued his precious telephone), the other was badly cut about

the head and leg and departed on a stretcher—a good man too.

Shoon got a scratch on his forehead and some splinters into his

left arm. Swore he was all right, but since he didn’t look it

was ordered to bed.

Ammunition replenished in the evening in a tearing hurry. It is

not pleasant to have teams standing about in a place like this.

Heard that on the return journey to the wagon line last night a

bombardier, four drivers, and five horses had been wounded—all

slightly, thank Heaven!

Shot all night at the wood (Bazentin-le-petit), and at the

front line.

_July 13._—Continued wire-cutting and searching the wood all

day. Scores of batteries doing the same thing, and noise

infernal. The Child went off to find out if he could see the

wire from the front edge of Mametz Wood (which now really is

in our possession). Failing to see it from there, he wandered

on up an old communication trench known as Middle Alley, which

led direct from our own to the German front line. Eventually

he found a place from which he could see through a gap in

the hedge. The wire was cut all right—and, incidentally, he

might have come face to face with a hostile bombing party at

any moment! But what seemed to interest him much more was the

behaviour of the orderly who had accompanied him. This N.C.O.,

who is the battery ‘look-out man,’ specially trained to observe

anything and everything, raised himself from the ground a

moment after they had both hurled themselves flat to await the

arrival of a five-nine in Mametz Wood, peered over a fallen

tree-trunk and said, ‘_That_ one, sir, was just in front, but

slightly to the left’!

Spent the afternoon preparing detailed orders and time-tables

for to-morrow’s ‘big show.’ Slept from 11 till 2.45 A.M.

_July 14._—The ‘intense’ bombardment began at 3.20 A.M.; the

infantry attack was launched five minutes later. Even to

attempt to describe this bombardment is beyond me. All that

can be said is that there was such a _hell_ of noise that it

was quite impossible to give any orders to the guns except

by sending subalterns from the telephone dug-out to shout in

the ear of each sergeant in turn. The battery (in company

with perhaps a hundred others) barraged steadily, ‘lifting’

fifty yards at a time from 3.25 till 7.15 A.M., by which

time some 900 rounds had been expended and the paint on the

guns was blistering from their heat. We gathered (chiefly

from information supplied by the Child at the O.P., who got

into touch with various staff and signal officers) that the

attack had been very successful. About 7.30 things slowed

down a little and the men were able to get breakfast and some

rest—half at a time, of course.

At midday cavalry moved up past us and affairs began to look

really promising. Slept from 3 to 5 P.M., then got orders to

reconnoitre an advanced position in front of Acid Drop Copse.

(It may here be noted that from our first position this very

copse was one of our most important targets at a range of

nearly 4000 yards.) Chose a position, but could see that if and

when we do occupy it, it is not going to be a health-resort.

And, owing to the appalling state of the ground, it will take

some driving to get there. Had a really good night’s rest for

once. Battery fired at intervals all night.

_July 15._—Attack continued. By 10.30 A.M. our guns had reached

extreme range and we were forced to stop. (We started at 2700

in this position.) News very good: enemy much demoralised and

surrendering freely. Practically no hostile shelling round us

now—in fact, we are rather out of the battle for the moment.

After lunch formed up the whole battery and thanked the men for

the splendid way that they had worked. Shoon, whose arm has got

worse, sent under protest to hospital. Desperately sorry to

lose him.

In the afternoon switched to the left, where we are apparently

still held up, and fired occasional salvos on Martinpuich.

Ditto all night.

_July 16._—Everybody much concerned over a certain Switch

Trench, which appears to be giving much trouble. Fired

spasmodically (by map) on this trench throughout the day. In

the evening all guns removed to a travelling Ordnance Workshop

for overhaul—they need it. Late at night received orders to dig

the Acid Drop Copse position next day, and occupy it as soon as

the guns are sent back.

_July 17._—Took all officers and practically every man up to

new position at 7 A.M. and started to dig. Shells all round

us while we worked, but still no damage. This is too good to

last. In the afternoon went out with George (another B.C.[2]

in the brigade), the Child, and a telephonist to look for an

O.P. whence to see this infernal Switch Trench. After a while

parted from George, whom we last saw walking _forward_ from

the villa, pausing occasionally to examine the country through

his glasses. We learnt afterwards that he spent a really happy

afternoon in No Man’s Land carrying various wounded infantrymen

into comparative safety! For which he has been duly recommended.

Got into the old German second line (taken on the 14th),

and found that it had been so completely battered by our

bombardment that its captors had been obliged to dig an

entirely new trench in front of it. This part of the world was

full of gunner officers _all_ looking for an O.P. for Switch

Trench. Returned to Acid Drop Copse about 5 P.M. and found

that the digging had progressed well. Marched the men back to

the old position, where they got tea and a rest. Teams came up

about 8. Packed up and moved forward. Ground so desperately

heavy that it became necessary to put ten horses in a team for

the last pull up the hill to the position. Got all guns into

action and twenty-one wagon loads of ammunition dumped by 11

P.M.—no casualties. Work of the men, who were much worn out,

beyond all praise.

The noise in this place is worse than anything previously

experienced. Being, as we are now, the most advanced battery in

this particular sector, we get the full benefit of every gun

that is behind us—and there are many. Moreover, the hostile

artillery is extremely active, especially in the wood, where

every shell comes down with a hissing rush that ends in an

appalling crash. About midnight the Boche began to put over

small ‘stink’ shells. These seemed to flit through the air, and

always landed with a soft-sounding ‘phutt’ very like a dud. One

burst just behind our trench and wounded a gunner in the foot.

Found it impossible to sleep, owing to the din.

_July 18._—At 4 A.M. the hostile bombardment seemed so intense

that, fearing a counter-attack, I got up to look round. Was

reassured by Angelo, who had already done so. Beyond the

fact that the wood was being systematically searched with

five-nines, there was nothing much doing. Returned to bed, but

still failed to sleep.

Fired at intervals throughout the day at various spots allotted

by Brigade H.Q. Having no O.P. had to do everything from the

map. Men all digging when not actually firing: position now

nearly splinter-proof. A most unnerving day, however. A Hun

barrage of ‘air-crumps’ on the ridge in front of us by the

Cutting, another one to our right along the edge of the wood,

many five-nines over our heads into the dip behind us, and

quite a few into Acid Drop Copse on our left rear.

In the afternoon we had half a dozen H.E. ‘pip-squeaks’ very

close at a moment when there were three wagons up replenishing

ammunition. One burst within four yards of the lead horses—and

no damage. This _cannot_ last. Orders for a big attack received

at 4 P.M. At 5 counter-orders to the effect that we are to be

relieved to-night. Fired continuously till about 8.30, then

packed up and waited for the teams, which arrived about 9.

We were just congratulating ourselves on our luck, it being

then rather a quiet moment and three out of the four teams

already on the move, when a big ‘air-crump’ burst straight

above our heads, wounding the sergeant-major in the thigh. Put

him up on the last limber and sent the guns off as fast as they

could go—ground too bad to gallop. Two more shells followed

us down the valley, but there were no further casualties. At

the bottom missed the Child: sent to inquire if he was at the

head of the column—no. Was beginning to get nervous, when he

strolled up from the rear, accompanied by the officers’-mess

cook.

‘Pity to leave these behind,’ he observed, throwing down a

kettle and a saucepan!

Nervy work loading up our stores and kits on to the G.S. wagon,

but the enemy battery had returned to its favourite spot by the

Cutting, and nothing further worried us. Marched back to the

wagon line (about five miles). Much amused by the tenacity with

which one of the sergeants clung to a jar of rum which he had

rescued from the position.[3] At the wagon line collected the

whole battery together, and while waiting went across to see

the sergeant-major in the dressing-station. Am afraid, though

it is nothing serious, that it will be a case of ‘Blighty’

for him. A very serious loss to the battery, as he has been

absolutely invaluable throughout this show.

Marched to our old bivouac at the swampy wood, but were

allotted a reasonable space outside it this time. Fell into

bed, beat to the world, at 3.30 A.M.

_July 19._—Much to do, though men and horses are tired to

death. Moved off at 6 P.M. and did a twenty-mile night march,

arriving at another bivouac at 2 A.M. Horses just about at

their last gasp. Poor old things, they have been in harness

almost continuously throughout the battle bringing up load

after load of ammunition at all hours of the day and night.

_July 20._—Took over a new position (trench warfare style) just

out of the battle area as now constituted, and settled down

to—rest.

The above is an accurate, though, I fear, far too personal, record of the

doings of one particular unit during a fortnight’s continuous fighting.

It is in no way an attempt to describe a battle as a whole. That is a

feat beyond my powers—and, I think, beyond the powers of anyone actually

engaged. Thinking things over now in the quiet of a well-made dug-out, I

realise that the predominant impressions left upon my mind, in ascending

order of magnitude so to speak, are: dirt, stink, horrors, lack of

sleep, funk—and the amazing endurance of the men. In the first article

of this series I wrote: ‘But this I know now—the human material with

which I have to deal is good enough.’ It is. I grant that our casualties

were slight (though in this respect we were extremely lucky), and that

compared with the infantry our task was the easier one of ‘standing the

strain’ rather than of ‘facing the music.’ But still think of the strain

on the detachments, serving their guns night and day almost incessantly

for fourteen days on end. In the first week alone we fired the amount

of ammunition which suffices for a battery in peace time for thirty

years! They averaged five hours’ sleep in the twenty-four, these men,

throughout the time; and they dug three separate positions—all in heavy

ground. Nor must one forget the drivers, employed throughout in bringing

up ammunition along roads pitted with holes, often shelled and constantly

blocked with traffic.

The New Ubique begins to be worthy of the Old.

FOOTNOTES

[2] Battery Commander.

[3] This jar was afterwards found to contain lime-juice!

_THE BICENTENARY OF GRAY._

_BORN DECEMBER 26, 1716._

BY THE DEAN OF NORWICH.

It is a mere chance, but none the less suggestive, that Shakespeare’s

commemoration this year should be followed by that of Gray. Shakespeare,

of course, would cut up into many poets, but one of them would have been

not unlike Gray; a man of a fastidious and somewhat melancholy temper

but with a rare affectionateness, and a sincere love of his kind, which

mingled with his critical faculty to produce a fresh and very delightful

humour. However this may be, the lesser poet was drawn to the greater by

a sure instinct from school-days. In a letter to Horace Walpole, written

when he was just eighteen, he finds it natural to disguise his boyish

affection in terms borrowed from Mrs. Quickly: ‘I have born and born,

and been fub’d off and fub’d off,’ &c.; and he does so again later: ‘If

I don’t hear from you this week, I shall be in a thousand Tyrrits and

Frights about you.’ To his more literary friend, Richard West, another

member of the ‘Quadruple Alliance,’ whose early death he was to mourn

in the most exquisite of elegies, he writes with enthusiasm about

Shakespeare’s language.

‘Every word in him is a picture. Pray put me the following lines into the

tongue of our modern Dramatics:

“But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,

Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass:

I, that am rudely stampt, and want love’s majesty

To strut before a wanton ambling nymph:

I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,

Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,

Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time

Into this breathing world, scarce half made up”—

and what follows. To me they appear untranslatable; and if this be the

case our language is greatly degenerated.’

‘Every word in him is a picture.’ He said the same thing in a fine

quatrain of the poem to Richard Bentley, contrasting the great masters

of old with the poets of his own day, especially with himself, whose

poems Bentley was illustrating:

‘But not to one in this benighted age

Is that diviner inspiration giv’n

That burns in Shakespeare’s or in Milton’s page,

The pomp and prodigality of heaven.’

In another letter to West of the same year he defends the practice of

‘judiciously and sparingly’ inserting phrases from Shakespeare into

modern poetry because of their greater energy; a practice which he

himself was to adopt in his later odes. Gray’s Shakespearian borrowings

are always judicious, but it may be questioned whether the effect of such

quotations from a greater writer by a less is not to create an impression

of poverty in the borrower. It is more important to inquire how far Gray

was successful in emulating the Shakespearian ‘pomp and prodigality’ of

imagination. The prodigality clearly was beyond even his ambition. His

Pegasus always required the spur rather than the reins. But the pomp, it

must be admitted, he did not infrequently achieve. No one can be blind to

the magnificence of the lines about Pindar in the ‘Progress of Poesy’:

‘Oh! Lyre divine, what daring Spirit

Wakes thee now? Tho’ he inherit

Nor the pride, nor ample pinion,

That the Theban eagle bear

Sailing with supreme dominion

Thro’ the azure deep of air.’

And in the ‘Elegy’ we have many imaginative pictures that have the true

Shakespearian quality:

‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave.’

‘And shut the gates of Mercy on mankind.’

‘Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death.’

‘Along the cool sequester’d vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.’

‘Left the warm precincts of the chearful day,

Nor cast one longing, ling’ring look behind.’

‘Even in our Ashes live their wonted Fires.’

It will be remembered that in the ‘Progress of Poesy’ English poetry is

represented by three names—Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. Dryden is

praised for the energy of his heroic couplet, symbolised by the

‘Two coursers of ethereal race

With necks in thunder cloath’d and long-resounding pace,’

who draw his car, and also for his one great lyrical achievement, the Ode

on St. Cecilia’s day. Gray’s admiration for Shakespeare and Milton as

models was tempered by his recognition of what Dryden had done for the

English language, in rendering it more ‘refined and free.’ To Beattie he

wrote, ‘Remember Dryden and be blind to all his faults,’ and he told him

in an interview (according to Mason) that ‘if there was any excellence

in his own numbers he had learned it wholly from that great poet; and

pressed him with great earnestness to study him, as his choice of words

and versification were singularly happy and harmonious.’ If Dryden’s

‘Alexander’s Feast’ be compared with the ‘Progress of Poesy’ we can see

how successfully Gray has blended the qualities he most admired in his

several masters. From Dryden he has caught the smoothness and strength of

his line; but Gray’s rhythm owes more to ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Comus’ than to

the commonplace movement of Dryden’s ode; while the imaginative beauty of

its many pictures was part of his debt to the greatest of them all. There

is one other great English poet to whom Gray was ready to acknowledge a

debt. He told Norton Nicholls that he never sat down to compose poetry

without reading Spenser for a considerable time previously. I do not

remember that Gray ever incorporates a Spenserian phrase in his own

verse; his instinct would have told him that the two styles would not

agree. But his instinct would also tell him that to bathe himself in

Spenser before entering the temple of his Muse was a sure way of freeing

himself from any pollution of mind or spirit.

The ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’ was composed at intervals

between 1746 and 1750, and sent to Walpole in June of that year. Walpole

showed it to many friends and in some way it got into the hands of a

publisher, who wrote to Gray announcing his intention of printing it,

and begging his ‘indulgence.’ Gray wrote at once to Walpole desiring him

to let Dodsley print it without delay from his copy, and it accordingly

appeared in February 16, 1751, in a quarto pamphlet, priced sixpence,

and entitled ‘An Elegy wrote in a Country Church Yard.’ The fashionable

solecism must be attributed to Walpole, who saw the poem through the

press, and prefixed this short ‘advertisement’:

‘The following Poem came into my hands by Accident, if

the general Approbation with which this little Piece has

spread, may be call’d by so slight a Term as Accident. It is

this Approbation which makes it unnecessary for me to make

any Apology but to the Author: As he cannot but feel some

Satisfaction in having pleas’d so many Readers already, I

flatter myself he will forgive my communicating that Pleasure

to many more. The Editor.’

In his letter thanking Walpole for his ‘paternal care’ of the poem Gray

speaks of the advertisement as ‘saving his honour’; which can only mean

that he thought the poem unworthy of being offered to the public by its

author. That this was not a mere affectation is shown by his annoyance

at its instant popularity, which he thought to be due to its subject. He

said it would have been equally popular if written in prose. He writes to

his friend Dr. Wharton, after speaking of ‘A Long Story,’ which had been

‘shew’d about in Town, and not liked at all’:

‘On the other hand the Stanzas have had the Misfortune by

Mr. W.’s fault to be made still more publick, for wᶜʰ they

certainly were never meant, but is too late to complain. They

have been so applauded, it is quite a Shame to repeat it. I

mean not to be modest; but I mean it is a Shame for those, who

have said such superlative Things about them, that I can’t

repeat them.’

Gray’s modesty was still further tried in the autumn of the same year by

Walpole’s insistence that he should allow his still unpublished odes, on

Spring, on Eton College, and on Walpole’s cat, with whatever else he had

to furnish a volume, to appear with illustrations by Walpole’s _protégé_,

Richard Bentley, a son of the great Master of Trinity. The negotiations,

so far as we have them in Gray’s correspondence, are diverting. Gray

discovered that it was in contemplation to prefix his own portrait; this

he forbade, though it was already half engraved. He objected to the

proposed title and insisted that it should be ‘Designs by Mr. R. Bentley

for six poems of Mr. T. Gray,’ on the ground that ‘the verses were only

subordinate and explanatory to the Drawings and suffered to come out thus

only for that reason.’ Lastly, he objected to Dodsley’s proposal to omit

the ‘Mr.’ before the names of the poet and artist, as being ‘an uncommon

sort of simplicity that looks like affectation.’ This modesty may have

been excessive, but it is not ridiculous when we reflect that Gray had

not yet produced his finest work, and knew that he had it in him to write

something more worthy of himself and English poetry than the occasional

pieces which Walpole wished to publish, or even than the deservedly

popular Elegy.

In 1757 Walpole issued, as the first book from his new printing-press at

Strawberry Hill, a quarto pamphlet entitled ‘Odes by Mr. Gray,’ with a

vignette on the title-page of his Gothick castle, and a motto from Pindar

ΦΩΝΑΝΤΑ ΣΥΝΕΤΟΙΣΙ which Gray englished as ‘vocal to the intelligent

alone.’ It contained two odes, here called simply Ode I and Ode II, ‘The

Progress of Poesy’ and ‘The Bard.’ The first of these odes is undoubtedly

Gray’s masterpiece, and deserves all the study that can be given to it.

The subject, that of the great power of poetry, was one very near to

Gray’s heart as well as to his mind, and the scheme is well thought out.

There is no feeling of strain in any part of it. Personification, with

Gray generally a sign of strain, is kept within the limits approved by

the great masters. Thus we have ‘antic Sports and blue-eyed Pleasures’

just as in the ‘Allegro’ we have ‘Jest and youthful Jollity’; but

there is no elaborate series of abstract figures like that in the two

stanzas on the Passions in the Ode on Eton College. This fashionable

personification perhaps justified itself to Gray as a combination of

the imaginative method of Shakespeare with the clear definition of

Dryden. What in Shakespeare would have been a metaphor, hinted at

and immediately succeeded by another, becomes too often with Gray a

substantial allegorical personage. There seems to us to-day something

essentially unpoetical, because artificial, in the posturing groups of

Furies and Graces, and we wonder that Gray with his fine critical sense

did not feel this. We must recognise, however, that whenever he is deeply

moved he escapes from the snare. Two consecutive stanzas in the ‘Ode on

Vicissitude’ show how his verse becomes more direct as it deepens in

feeling.

‘Still, where rosy Pleasure leads,

See a kindred Grief pursue;

Behind the steps that Misery treads,

Approaching Comfort view:

The hues of Bliss more lightly glow,

Chastised by sabler tints of woe,

And blended form, with artful strife,

The strength and harmony of Life.

See the Wretch, that long has tost

On the thorny bed of Pain,

At length repair his vigour lost,

And breathe and walk again:

The meanest flowret of the vale,

The simplest note that swells the gale,

The common Sun, the air, the skies,

To him are opening Paradise.’

When the two odes were reissued they were styled Pindaric, and they

justify their title, being constructed in a series of strophe,

antistrophe, and epode like the odes of Pindar. Ben Jonson had furnished

one example in the ode to the memory of Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry

Morrison, one strophe of which is the often-quoted stanza beginning, ‘It

is not growing like a tree.’ But the name ‘Pindarique’ had been abused

by Cowley, who, holding the theory that ‘the lost excellences of another

language’ should be supplied by others of our own, had substituted an

expansive eloquence, one might almost say loquacity, for the terse

musical phrase of his model, and had entirely ignored the interrelation

of strophe and antistrophe. Gray recovered for the Pindaric ode both the

music of phrase and the balance of its parts.

Gray’s second ode cannot be reckoned as unequivocal a success as its

companion. It is founded on a tradition of the murder of the Welsh bards

by Edward I, and the earlier portion, which consists of the spirited and

justifiable curses of the last survivor on the king’s progeny to the

third and fourth generation, is proper to the subject, and contains much

fine rhetoric and a few passages of a nobler quality. But having written

the first three groups of stanzas, Gray held his hand for a couple of

years; and the conclusion does not carry out the scheme originally

proposed. From the argument, which Mason printed from Gray’s commonplace

book, we learn that the Bard was to predict that all the king’s cruelty

‘shall never extinguish the noble ardour of poetic genius in this island;

and that men shall never be wanting to celebrate true virtue and valour

in immortal strains, to expose vice and infamous pleasure, and boldly

censure tyranny and oppression.’ When Gray resumed the Ode he had changed

his plan, and the present conclusion can appeal to none but Welshmen, for

whom it is certain that Gray did not specially write. The consolation

which the Bard finds in the future is the prospect of a line of Welsh

kings, the Tudors, culminating in Elizabeth:

In the midst a Form divine

Her eye proclaims her of the Briton-line;

Her lyon-port, her awe-commanding face,

Attemper’d sweet to virgin-grace.’

Elizabeth’s reign is to be marked by a revival of poetry in Spenser,

Shakespeare, and Milton, and an unending line beyond them. It must be

allowed that the skill of the poet has disguised the weakness of the

argument. For to make the consolation effective the efflorescence of

poetry should have occurred under the first Tudor sovereign, in which

case it might poetically have been presumed to be due to him; and the

Bard should not have overlooked Chaucer, who flourished under the sway of

Edward’s direct descendant Richard II, of whose accession the Bard sings

in the only passage of the Ode which has passed into popular currency:

‘Fair laughs the Morn, and soft the Zephyr blows,

While proudly riding o’er the azure realm,

In gallant trim the gilded Vessel goes;

Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm;

Regardless of the sweeping Whirlwind’s sway,

That, hush’d in grim repose, expects his evening-prey.’

The ‘Elegy’ is an expression of the common heart, though of that common

heart purified and ennobled, and therefore it is of universal appeal; of

the Odes it is true to-day as in Gray’s lifetime that they are vocal only

to the intellectuals. But apart from its merits all Gray’s poetry has a

special interest owing to its place at the meeting-point of the Augustan

and Romantic schools. On the one hand it retains the notion of poetry as

a happy combination of words. Gray, in a letter to Mason, says: ‘Extreme

conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical, is one of

the grand beauties of lyric poetry’; adding ‘this I have always aimed at

and could never attain.’ Gray’s instrument was always the file; he had

no taste for the verse cast at a jet; and so he could accuse Collins of

having a bad ear. In the second place, there are signs in Gray of that

first-hand interest in nature and that respect for the whole of human

nature, and not only its intellect, which was soon to inspire Cowper and

Wordsworth. Perhaps Gray is at his modernest in the ‘Ode on Vicissitude,’

and in that impromptu couplet which Norton Nicholls preserved:

‘There pipes the woodlark, and the song-thrush there

Scattering his loose notes in the waste of air’—

if not most modern of all in that quatrain of the ‘Elegy’ which Gray’s

feeling for unity expunged, but which we cannot spare:

‘There scatter’d oft the earliest of the year,

By Hands unseen, are show’rs of violets found:

The red-breast loves to build and warble there,

And little footsteps lightly print the ground.’

Leslie Stephen says happily about Gray and his friends that ‘they were

feeling round vaguely for a new mode of literary and artistic enjoyment.’

This feeling after something more satisfying to the whole range of

thought and emotion than was afforded by the critical school of Pope

had already given evidence of itself in several ways. Thomson and Dyer,

following each his particular bent, had found inspiration for poetry

in country life and landscape. Gray welcomed the venture of both these

poets. We know from his letters how attentive was his own observation,

and how he took long journeys in search of the picturesque, especially

in mountain scenery; but the evidence of this in his poetry is only

incidental, as in the reference to ‘Snowdon’s shaggy side.’ Another

form taken by this dissatisfaction was the revival of interest in the

popular ballad literature. The discovery by Thomas Percy of his famous

folio started a new form of poetry in which Goldsmith led the way. But

though Gray had seen Percy’s book as early as 1761, it came too late to

influence his production; and we may guess that his mind was too erudite

to have found expression in the simplicity of the ballad. Of far more

interest to him was Macpherson’s discovery of fragments of Highland

poetry. He describes himself as ‘_extasié_ with their infinite beauty’;

on which the late Mr. Tovey, to whom a great debt is owed for his

scholarly edition of Gray’s letters, makes the dry comment that some of

the fragments were worked up from passages in ‘The Bard.’ We may be glad

that Macpherson’s discovery came, like Percy’s, too late to influence

Gray’s own poetry. His interest in the early literature of the European

nations has given us a few fragments from the Norse and Welch. The remark

of Leslie Stephen quoted above referred to the interest that Gray and

Walpole took in Gothic architecture. This influenced Gray’s poetry only

indirectly; but it had some effect in the way it was presented to the

public. When Walpole undertook to convert his newly purchased house at

Twickenham into a Gothick castle, the artist he employed to help him in

his designs was Richard Bentley; and when Gray had sprung suddenly into

fame by the ‘Elegy,’ Walpole urged him to publish his other poems with

designs by Bentley. Whether these deserve the poetical encomium Gray

made upon them, I will not presume to say; but they are undoubtedly very

‘Gothick.’

It is as a poet that we celebrate Gray’s bicentenary, but those

persons who do not care for poetry may celebrate him as a man and a

letter-writer. As a man he is secure of our affection as soon as we get

to know him, and any one may know him who will read his letters, of which

there is a great store; and still more have come to light lately, and

have been well edited by Mr. Paget Toynbee. There are few men of letters

of so attractive a nature as Gray. Perhaps he is the most lovable of all

except Charles Lamb, and with Lamb, despite many obvious differences,

he has many points in common. They were both solitary creatures living

a recluse life, in the world but not of it, their best companions among

the dead; they were both exquisite critics; they were both a prey to

melancholy, or rather, as Gray said, to ‘leukocholy’; white bile not

black; they had both a delicate and delightful humour; they were both

the soul of gentle goodness. And so it comes about that the letters

of both, in which they live to us, are among the few external goods

which are necessary to happiness. The charm of a letter of Gray’s lies

partly in this interest of his character, and partly in the perfect

felicity with which everything is said. There is nothing slovenly,

or far-fetched, or pompous, or makeshift; even in the shortest and

apparently most hasty note, his touch is perfectly sure and his taste

faultless; if we except some Hogarthian passages which smack of the age

rather than the individual. It might not seem probable beforehand that

the letters of a man whose days went ‘round and round like the blind

horse in the mill’—‘swinging from chapel or hall home and from home to

hall or chapel’—could have much to say that would be of general interest.

Occasionally, indeed, he goes a journey—the grand tour with Walpole, or

to the Highlands, or to see his friend Wharton at Old Park, or to Stoke

Poges to his relations, and then we get lively enough descriptions. But

these are episodes. The main topics of his every-day correspondence

are his melancholy or his indolence, Mason’s poetry, Cambridge and

Church news, the British Museum, politics, criticism of current

literature,—Rousseau, or Sterne, or Dodsley’s poets,—his dab of musick

and prints,’ gothick, hyacinths, and the weather. Occasionally, only

occasionally, he allows himself to slip out a little town gossip, ‘as a

decayed gentlewoman would a piece of right mecklin or a little quantity

of run tea, but this only now and then, not to make a practice of it.’

_THE REAL THING: ‘S. O. S.’_

BY WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON.

Copyright, 1917, by William Hope Hodgson, in the United States of America.

‘Big liner on fire in 55.43 N. and 32.19 W.,’ shouts the Captain, diving

into his chart-room. ‘Here we are! Give me the parallels!’

The First Officer and the Captain figure busily for a minute.

‘North, 15 West,’ says the Master; and ‘North, 15 West,’ assents the

First Officer, flinging down his pencil. ‘A hundred and seventeen miles,

dead in the wind!’

‘Come on!’ says the Captain; and the two of them dash out of the

chart-room into the roaring black night, and up on to the bridge.

‘North, 15 West!’ the Master shouts in the face of the burly helmsman.

‘Over with her, smart!’

‘North, 15 West, Sir,’ shouts back the big quartermaster, and whirls the

spokes to starboard, with the steering-gear engine roaring.

The great vessel swings round against the night, with enormous scends,

smiting the faces of the great seas with her seventy-feet-high bows.

Crash! A roar of water aboard, as a hundred phosphorescent tons of

sea-water hurls inboard out of the darkness, and rushes aft along

the lower decks, boiling and surging over the hatchways, capstans,

deck-fittings, and round the corners of the deck-houses.

The ship has hit the fifty-mile-an-hour gale full in the face, and the

engine telegraph stands at full speed. The Master has word with that King

of the Underworld, the Chief Engineer; and the Chief goes below himself

to take charge, just as the Master has taken charge on deck.

There is fresh news from the Operator’s Room. The vessel somewhere out

in the night and the grim storm is the S.S. _Vanderfield_, with sixty

first-class passengers and seven hundred steerage and she is alight

forrard. The fire has got a strong hold, and they have already lost three

boats, smashed to pieces as they tried to launch them, and every man,

woman, and child in the boats crushed to death or drowned.

‘Damn these old-fashioned davits!’ says the Master, as he reads the

wireless operator’s notes. ‘They won’t lift a boat out clear of the

ship’s side, if she’s rolling a bit. The boats in a ship are just

ornaments, if you’ve not got proper machinery for launching them. We’ve

got the new derricks, and we can lower a boat, so she strikes the water,

forty feet clear of the side, instead of bashing to pieces, like a

sixty-foot pendulum, against our side!’

He shouts a question over his shoulder, standing there by the binnacle:

‘What’s she doing, Mister Andrews?’

‘Twenty and three-quarter knots, Sir,’ says the Second Officer, who has

been in charge. ‘But the Chief’s raising her revolutions every minute....

She’s nearly on to the twenty-one now.’

‘And even if we lick that we’ll be over five hours reaching her,’ mutters

the Master to himself.

Meanwhile the wireless is beating a message of hope across a hundred

miles of night and storm and wild waters.

‘Coming! The R.M.S. _Cornucopia_ is proceeding at full speed in your

direction. Keep us informed how you are....’

Then follows a brief unofficial statement, a heart-to-heart word between

the young men operators of the two ships, across the hundred-mile gulf of

black seas:

‘Buck up, old man. We’ll do it yet! We’re simply piling into the storm,

like a giddy cliff. She’s doing close on twenty-one, they’ve just told

me, against this breeze; and the Chief’s down in the stokeholds himself

with a fourteen-inch wrench and a double watch of stokers! Keep all your

peckers up. I’ll let you know if we speed-up any more!’

The Operator has been brief and literal, and has rather under-stated the

facts. The Leviathan is now hurling all her fifty-thousand-ton length

through the great seas at something approaching a twenty-two knot stride;

and the speed is rising.

Down in the engine-room and stokeholds, the Chief, minus his overalls,

is a coatless demi-god, with life in one hand and a fourteen-inch wrench

in the other; not that this wrench is in any way necessary, for the

half-naked men stream willing sweat in a silence broken only by the rasp

of the big shovels and the clang of the furnace-doors, and the Chief’s

voice.

The Chief is young again; young and a King to-night, and the rough days

of his youth have surged back over him. He has picked up the wrench

unconsciously, and he walks about, twirling it in his fist; and the

stokers work the better for the homely sight of it, and the sharp tang of

his words, that miss no man of them all.

And the great ship feels the effect. Her giant tread has broken into

an everlasting thunder, as her shoulders hurl the seas to port and

starboard, in shattered hills of water, that surge to right and left in

half-mile drifts of phosphorescent foam, under the roll of her Gargantuan

flanks.

* * * * *

The first hour has passed, and there have been two fresh messages from

that vessel, flaming far off, lost and alone, out in the wild roar of

the waters. There has been an explosion forrard in the burning ship,

and the fire has come aft as far as the main bunkers. There has been a

panic attempt to lower two more of the boats, and each has been smashed

to flinders of wood against the side of the burning ship, as she rolled.

Every soul in them has been killed or drowned, and the Operator in the

burning ship asks a personal question that has the first touch of real

despair in it; and there ensues another little heart-to-heart talk

between the two young men:

‘Honest now, do you think you can do it?’

‘Sure,’ says the Operator in the _Cornucopia_. ‘We’re doing what we’ve

never done at sea before in heavy weather. We’re touching within a knot

of our “trials” speed—we’re doing twenty-four and a half knots; and we’re

doing it against _this_! Honour bright, old man! I’ll not deceive you

at a time like this. I never saw anything like what we’re doing. All

the engineers are in the engine-room, and all the officers are on the

boat-deck, overhauling the boats and gear. We’ve got those new forty-foot

boat derricks, and we can shove a boat into the water with ’em, with the

ship rolling half under. The Old Man’s on the bridge; and I guess you’re

just going to be saved all right.... You ought to hear us! I tell you,

man, she’s just welting the seas to a pulp, and skating along to you on

the top of them.’

The Operator is right. The great ship seems alive to-night, along all

her shapely eight hundred feet of marvellous, honest, beautiful steel.

Her enormous bows take the seas as on a horn, and hurl them roaring

into screaming drifts of foam. She is singing a song, fore and aft, and

the thunder of her grey steel flanks is stupendous, as she spurns the

mutilated seas and the gale and the bleak intolerable miles into her wake.

* * * * *

The second and third hours pass, and part of the fourth, in an

intermittent thunder of speed. And the speed has been further increased;

for now the Leviathan is laying the miles astern, twenty-nine in

each hour; her sides drunken with black water and spume—a dripping,

league-conquering, fifty-thousand-ton shape of steel and steam and

brains, going like some stupendous Angel of Help across the black

Desolation of the night.

* * * * *

Incredibly far away, down on the black horizons of the night, there shows

a faint red glow. There is shouting along the bridge.

‘There she is!’ goes the word fore and aft. ‘There she is!’

Meanwhile the wireless messages pulse across the darkness: The fire is

burning with terrible fury. The fore-part of the _Vanderfield’s_ iron

skin is actually glowing red-hot in places. Despair is seizing everyone.

Will the coming _Cornucopia_ never, never come?

The young Operators talk, using informal words:

‘Look out to the South of you, for our searchlight,’ replies the man in

the wireless-room of the _Cornucopia_. ‘The Old Man’s going to play it

against the clouds, to let you see we’re coming. Tell ’em all to look out

for it. It’ll cheer them up. We’re walking along through the smother like

an express. Man! Man! we’re doing our “trials” speed, twenty-five and a

half knots, _against this_. Do you realise it—_against this_! Look along

to the South. Now!’

* * * * *

There is a hissing on the fore-bridge, quite unheard in the roar of the

storm; and then there shoots out across the miles of night and broken

seas the white fan-blaze of the searchlight. It beats like an enormous

baton against the black canopy of the monstrous storm-clouds, beating

to the huge, thundering melody of the roar and onward hurl of the

fifty-thousand-ton rescuer, tossing the billows to right and left, as she

strides through the miles.

And what a sight it is, in the glare of the great light, as it descends

and shows the huge seas! A great cliff of black water rears up, and leaps

forward at the ship’s bows. There is a thunderous impact, and the ship

has smitten the great sea in twain, and tossed it boiling and roaring

on to her iron flanks; and is treading it into the welter of foam that

surrounds her on every side—a raging testimony, of foam and shattered

seas, to the might of her mile-devouring stride.

Another, and another, and another black, moving cliff rises up out of the

water-valleys, which she strides across; and each is broken and tossed

mutilated from her shapely, mighty, unafraid shoulders.

* * * * *

A message is coming, very weak and faint, through the receiver:

‘We’ve picked up your searchlight, old man. It’s comforted us mightily;

but we can’t last much longer. The dynamo’s stopped. I’m running on my

batteries....’ It dwindles off into silence, broken by fragments of a

message, too weakly projected to be decipherable.

* * * * *

‘Look at her!’ the officers shout to one another on the bridge; for the

yell of the wind and the ship-thunder is too great for ordinary speech to

be heard. They are staring through their glasses. Under a black canopy of

bellied storm-clouds, shot with a dull red glowing, there is tossed up on

the backs of far-away seas, a far-off ship, seeming incredibly minute,

because of the distance; and from her fore-part spouts a swaying tower of

flame.

‘We’ll never do it in time!’ says the young Sixth Officer into the ear of

the Fifth.

* * * * *

The burning ship is now less than three miles away, and the black backs

of the great seas are splashed with huge, ever shifting reflections.

Through the glasses it is possible now to see the details of the

tremendous hold the fire has got on the ship; and, away aft, the huddled

masses of the six hundred odd remaining passengers.

As they watch, one of the funnels disappears with an unheard crash, and a

great spout of flame and sparks shoot up.

‘It’ll go through her bottom!’ shouts the Second Officer; but they know

this does not happen, for she still floats.

* * * * *

Suddenly comes the thrilling cry of ‘Out derricks!’ and there is a racing

of feet and shouted orders. Then the great derricks swing out from the

ship’s side, a boat’s length above the boat-deck. They are hinged, and

supported down almost to the draught line of the ship. They reach out

forty feet clear of the ship’s side.

The Leviathan is bursting through the final miles of wild seas; and then

the telegraph bell rings, and she slows down, not more than ten or

twelve hundred yards to wind’ard of the burning hull, which rises and

falls, a stupendous spectacle on the waste of black seas.

The fifty-thousand-ton racer has performed her noble work, and now the

work lies with the boats and the men.

* * * * *

The searchlight flashes down on to the near water, and the boats shoot

out in the ‘travellers,’ then are dropped clear of the mighty flanks of

the Mother Ship.

The Leviathan lies to windward of them, to break the force of the seas,

and oil bags are put out.

The people in the burning ship greet the ship with mad cheers. The women

are hove bodily into the seas, on the ends of lines. They float in their

cork jackets. Men take children in their arms, and jump, similarly

equipped. And all are easily picked up by the boats, in the blaze of the

rescuer’s searchlights that brood on leagues of ocean, strangely subdued

by the floods of oil which the big ship is pumping on to the seas.

Everywhere lies the strange sheen of oil, here in a sudden valley of

brine, unseen, or there on the shoulder of some monstrous wave, suddenly

eased of its deadliness; or again, the same fluorescence swirls over some

half-league of eddy-flattened ocean, resting between efforts—tossing

minor oil-soothed ridges into the tremendous lights.

Then the Leviathan steams to leeward of the burning ship, and picks

up her boats. She takes the rescued passengers aboard, and returns

to windward; then drops the boats again, and repeats the previous

operations, until every man, woman, and child is saved.

As the last boat swings up at the end of the great derricks aboard the

_Cornucopia_ there is a final volcano of flame from the burning ship,

lighting up the black belly of the sky into billowing clouds of redness.

There falls the eternal blackness of the night.... The _Vanderfield_ has

gone.

The Leviathan swings round through the night, with her six hundred saved;

and begins to sing again in her deep heart, laying the miles and the

storm astern once more, in a deep low thunder.

_THE WAR IN PERSPECTIVE._

BY DR. W. H. FITCHETT.

The present war is the biggest event in secular history—so big indeed

that its scale evades the imagination. Its cause cannot be condensed into

a formula or its story told in a volume. But every war, sooner or later,

finds literary expression; and the present gigantic struggle needs, and

will create, a new literature of its own, beside which all the rest of

secular literature will seem petty. A hundred years hence professional

soldiers will be spelling out its strategy; toiling historians will

be collating and recording its events; philosophers will be analysing

its causes, moralists in spectacles will be assessing its spiritual

elements. What a literature—strategic, scientific, political, financial,

geographical, legal, medical, personal—it will be!

And when all such questions are dealt with there will yet remain that

aspect of the war which has nothing to do with strategy, or politics, or

finance. It deals with the purely human interests and emotions of the

struggle; its picturesqueness; its dramatic incidents; the strophe and

antistrophe of moral forces it reveals; its literary aspects, in a word;

things in it which would have arrested the imagination of Shakespeare,

and supplied the text for mightier dramas than ‘Macbeth’ or ‘Hamlet’;

incidents that Scott would have woven into romance; follies which might

have given Swift the text for keener satire than even his ‘Tale of a

Tub’; heroisms that a greater Byron may set to more resounding music than

even those famous lines which tell of Waterloo. And, it may be added, it

is possible already to see in this amazing war some aspects which will

do more than merely challenge the literary imagination, the sense of the

wonderful.

To begin with what is nearest: the new scale of the war, the strange

temper, the terrific weapons with which it is being fought, will

certainly prove, for centuries to come, an irresistible challenge to the

literary imagination. When the first shot in this war was fired, the

whole familiar and accepted arithmetic of battle went suddenly to wreck.

It was a war, not of armies, but of nations. As a result we have to think

of the contending forces in terms of millions.

Australia, for example, supplies a proof of the enormously expanded

scale of this war. The standing army of Imperial Rome consisted of

260,000 men. Australia is a community of only five million people; war

to it is a totally new experience. Yet it has raised, equipped, and sent

to a battlefield 12,000 miles distant an army equal in number to the

standing army of the Caesars, at the time the Caesars were the masters

of the civilised world. Great Britain affords another example of the

amazingly expanded realm of the war. She hates standing armies, hates

them so much that she will only pass the Mutiny Act, which makes an army

of any sort possible, for a year at a time. The British formula is a big

fleet and a little army. When this war broke out the regular forces of

Great Britain consisted of only 186,000 men. When the war was not yet

two years old, the British fleet had taken a scale without precedent in

history; in addition Great Britain had raised an army which approached

5,000,000 and in which every man was a volunteer. If the average Liberal

member of Parliament had been told, say, three years ago, that Great

Britain, in addition to having a fleet in scale so tremendous, would

have a land force of 5,000,000, he probably would have assaulted his

interlocutor. But Great Britain, having raised by voluntary effort those

5,000,000, has actually passed a Conscription Bill for the remainder of

its population.

The battles of to-day take such a scale, last so long, and are fought

under such strange conditions, that we have to invent new names for

them. They are neither ‘sieges’ nor ‘battles,’ but a combination of

both; and so we call them siege-battles. That ‘first and last of fights,

king-making Waterloo,’ when set against the arithmetic of the present

war, dwindles into a skirmish. The little shallow valley outside

Brussels, where Napoleon and Wellington measured swords with each other,

and one of the greatest soldiers in history ended his career, is in area

three miles by two, and lies open to a single glance. Waterloo itself

began at 11 o’clock in the morning, and ended before 9 o’clock at night;

it might have been fought under the Factories Act.

Let there be set beside it the great siege-battle of the Aisne, which

began on September 15, 1914, and is going on still, with louder thunders

and vaster slaughter than ever. Its field has lengthened into a ribbon

of contorted trenches stretching from the North Sea to the Alps, a

distance of 500 miles, and from, or in, those strange, vast, far-running

ditches, now for nearly two years, some 3,000,000 men, the best fighters

in history, armed with an artillery which suggests nothing so much as

the weapons with which Milton equipped Satan and his hosts in their war

with the angels, have been slaying each other. The deep thunder of the

guns, the tumult of fighting men, have never ceased to sound at one point

or another along those five hundred miles for nearly two years. Verdun,

with all its passion and slaughter, its six months’ wrestle of guns and

infantry, is a mere episode in this tremendous siege-battle; a score of

Waterloos and Marengos have been fought during its progress, and have

scarcely found a record.

The most brilliant chapter in British military history before the

present war was certainly Wellington’s campaigns in the Peninsula. They

lasted six years. The British forces under Wellington seldom approached,

and never exceeded, 50,000 men. Napier condenses the story into a

single sentence of stately and resonant prose. In that great struggle

the British forces ‘fought and won nineteen pitched battles, made or

sustained ten sieges, took four great fortresses; killed, wounded, and

took 200,000 enemies, etc.;’ and the cost of all this is to be found

in ‘the bones of 40,000 British soldiers’ which ‘lie scattered on the

plains and mountains of the Peninsula.’ But Sir John French’s army in

France lost in three weeks more than Wellington’s armies in the Peninsula

lost in six years! In a single episode of the siege-battle beyond the

Aisne Valley—say, the second battle of Ypres, which lasted four days—the

British employed greater forces, and sustained greater losses, than in

Wellington’s six campaigns in the Peninsula.

The most brilliant, desperate, and bloody siege of those campaigns was

that of Badajos, in 1812. No one who has read the story Napier tells of

how, on the night Badajos was stormed, the men of the Light Division died

on its dark breach, can ever forget the tale. Now the siege of Badajos

lasted twenty days; it cost Wellington 5000 men. The storming parties

were let loose at 10 o’clock on the night of April 6; when morning dawned

Badajos was won. Compare this with Verdun. The German attack began

on February 23. Some 3000 guns—amongst them the great howitzers that

destroyed Namur—poured for days and nights an unceasing tempest of high

explosives on the French lines. Then the assault was launched. For nearly

six months the thunder of the German guns has risen and sunk, but never

ceased; again and again, now on one point, now on another, the vast grey

waves of the German infantry have flung themselves in bloody ebb and

flow on the French position. What the German losses have been can only

be guessed; they must reach half a million men. And still the tricolour

flies over Verdun.

If we take the fighting on the sea, again, there is the same tremendous

increase of scale. Trafalgar is—or _was_, till May 31 of the present

year—the greatest sea-fight under the British flag, and it is curious

to set it in contrast with the fight in the North Sea. The resemblances

and differences of the two great battles are alike most striking. That

little, one-eyed, one-armed, weather-beaten, sun-tanned figure, Nelson,

is the dominating figure in Trafalgar; and he is still the most famous of

all who have led the fleets of Great Britain into battle. But if we turn

to the recent battle in the North Sea—a battle so splendidly fought, and

so ill-told—it is clear that, in quickness of vision to read the iron

alphabet of sea-battle, and in the dash and fire with which he dared

all risks to turn and hold his enemy, Sir David Beatty is of Nelson’s

school, and has ‘the Nelson touch.’ Nelson himself, indeed, could hardly

have done better on that foggy afternoon in the North Sea than Sir David

Beatty did. For seamanship, for technical skill, and for pure valour,

the North Sea fight, in brief, will compare with Trafalgar. But in its

general aspect, in the scale of the forces engaged, and in the amount of

destruction achieved—and the terrifying speed of that destruction—the

two battles are utterly unlike each other. A comparison betwixt them

shows how completely the whole physiognomy of sea-battle is changed.

Beatty’s six battle-cruisers carried only 9-inch armour, but they had the

hitting-power of Dreadnoughts and the pace of destroyers; and _speed_ was

the great feature of the North Sea fight. The ships engaged under both

flags were amongst the swiftest afloat, and the battle was fought at full

speed. At the critical moment of the fight the ships of Beatty’s squadron

were travelling at the rate of thirty miles an hour, firing as they

raced. They could head, and turn, the line of German ships because they

outpaced them. But if the ships were swift, death was swifter. It was as

they whirled around across the head of the German line that the _Queen

Mary_ and the _Indefatigable_, in turn, were destroyed, and destroyed in

a space of time to be reckoned in minutes—whether by the concentrated

fire of the big German Dreadnoughts, or by the misadventure of striking a

floating mine, is not clear.

It is exactly at the two points of furious speed and of destructive

energy that the contrast betwixt Trafalgar and the fight in the North

Sea is greatest. At Trafalgar, as everyone knows, the Franco-Spanish

fleet was drawn up, or had drifted, into a straggling crescent four miles

from tip to tip—thirty-three great line-of-battle ships, armed with more

than 3000 guns, a curving forest of masts and flags. The British in two

columns—Nelson in the _Victory_ leading one column, Collingwood in the

_Royal Sovereign_ the other—bore down on the enemy, but there was no

speed in the movement. They drifted, rather than sailed, at the rate of

less than two miles an hour—less than a walking-pace, that is—into this

curve of hostile guns; and the coolness of the British crews and their

officers was in keeping with the deliberation with which their ships

approached the enemy. The _Royal Sovereign_ was a quarter of a mile ahead

of its column, and was certain to receive the concentrated fire of the

enemy’s line for nearly half an hour without support, yet Collingwood was

not only nibbling but _paring_ an apple on the quarter-deck while waiting

for the great game to begin.

Nelson’s three-deckers, compared with the modern Dreadnought or

battle-cruiser, were tiny ships. They had an average tonnage of a little

over 2000 tons—the _Victory_ herself was of 2223 tons. Now, a ship of the

_Queen Elizabeth_ class is of 27,000 tons, equal to the tonnage of the

whole column of Nelson’s ships at Trafalgar. The _Victory_ carried 101

guns, about one-third being 32-pounders; there were only two carronades

firing a shot of sixty-two pounds. If every gun on the _Victory_ had been

fired in one sudden broadside, the entire weight of metal would have

been 2296 pounds, or a little over one ton of iron, and the effective

range would be less than half a mile. But the _Queen Elizabeth_, with her

15-inch guns, could discharge, in a single broadside, _twenty-seven tons_

of steel, and could strike her mark with that tempest of flying metal—a

swarm of aerolites—once every thirty seconds, a dozen miles away.

The number of men killed at Trafalgar, leaving out the wounded, was

only 449. On the _Victory_ itself 57 were killed, on the ‘Fighting’

_Téméraire_ 47, on the _Royal Sovereign_ 47, on the _Belle Isle_ 33, or

a total of 184 killed in the four leading ships. But the _Cressy_, the

_Aboukir_, and the _Hogue_ were sunk in fifteen minutes—without seeing

the submarine that sank them—and 680 seamen were drowned, a loss fifty

per cent. greater than that of the whole of Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar.

Sir David Beatty’s two battle-cruisers, the _Queen Mary_ and the

_Indefatigable_, were sunk in a time as brief as the three unfortunate

cruisers, and sunk when travelling at their highest speed, and firing as

they raced. Each carried a complement of 900 men, and when they went down

the loss of life was four times as great as that of Trafalgar.

A century hence what may be called the German psychology, as revealed in

this war, will still puzzle the curiosity and challenge the imagination

of unborn generations. For the first time in history we have the

spectacle of a nation of seventy million people, Christian in faith,

highly civilised, strong on the practical side, of shrewdest business

capacity, with a genius for business and for organisation, a nation that

has given to education, or what it thinks is education, a larger place

in its life than any other in history, yet which somehow is smitten with

a sort of insanity, an insanity partly moral and partly intellectual.

And what heightens the wonder is the circumstance that it mistakes its

very lunacy for culture. To make the tragedy complete, it is an insanity

organised, armed, disciplined, terrible, equipped with all the resources

of science, and having borrowed from science new engines and subtleties

of destruction without precedent in the history of war.

In its essence what we are watching is the spiritual bankruptcy of a

great nation; but the whole story bristles with psychological problems.

Its spiritual landmarks have shifted. Good and evil are terms in its

politics which have not merely lost, but—a much more terrible thing—have

_exchanged_ their significance. It mistakes might for right. It labels

its vices as virtues.

In one sense, Germany is rich in intellectual ability—the Germany to

which Beethoven sang, and Goethe discoursed philosophy, for which Kant

moralised, and at which Heine jested. It has a list of names great in

poetry, philosophy, and scholarship. Germany, too, has done great things

in science, though not so much in the realm of scientific discovery. It

adapts rather than discovers; it excels in translating the scientific

discoveries of other races into practical terms. Noticeable, also, is

the fact that the great names in German literature, philosophy, and

scholarship are not Prussian; and it is Prussia, and the Prussianised

form of Germany, which is troubling the world. Luther came from Eisleben;

Leibnitz was a Czech; Kant was of Scottish blood; Bismarck, it is amusing

to remember, told Prince Napoleon, ‘I am _not_ a German; I am a Prussian,

a Wend’—that is, a Slav. Both Nietzsche and Treitschke came of a Slav

stock; most of the great ‘German’ musicians came of a Jewish strain;

Heine was, of course, a pure Jew.

Nearly all the public documents issued by the German Government during

this war, and all the speeches of its statesmen, are thick-inlaid with

statements which, if not blank lies, and known by the speaker or writer

to be lies, are yet proofs of some disordered quality in the mind of the

speaker or writer. Sometimes the speaker seems to be self-hypnotised, so

that he really believes a lie as big as a mountain to be the truth; or he

suffers from some eccentric paralysis of the memory which enables him to

forget what he has said, or written, only a moment before.

The famous ‘scrap of paper’ incident, taken as a whole, has the office of

a searchlight as showing the morbid condition both of German morals and

of German intelligence. Anybody with a touch of literary imagination will

look back upon that scene in a room in Berlin, when the German Chancellor

complained to Sir Edward Goschen, ‘You are going to war with us over a

scrap of paper,’ and recognise it as one of the most picturesque, as well

as the great and critical, moments in history. The German represented the

greatest military Power in the world, the Englishman the greatest naval

Power. Had both agreed to dismiss as a mere ‘scrap of paper’ the treaty

that guards the neutrality of Belgium, the sanctity of all treaties would

have disappeared at a breath.

But that dismissal into space as a mere scrap of paper of the treaty

guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium, which bore the name of Germany,

was to Germany herself a worse disaster than the loss of a pitched

battle. It was a form of suicide. It destroyed her public credit; it

dismissed her from the realm of good faith. When, at the end of the war,

the representatives of the nations now in conflict sit around some table

in London or in Paris to draw up terms of peace, the ghost of this scrap

of paper will cost Germany much, for she has stripped herself of all

title to be trusted. Now, a blunder so unspeakably stupid on the part of

men so able shows that at that moment, and in that act, the brains of the

men who were the representatives of Germany were in some curious state of

paralysis.

But this gigantic blunder is to this day being pursued by Germany with

explanations and justifications which, as examples of unreason, suggest

nothing so much as the logic employed in ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ The

German Chancellor himself some time afterwards asked the world to believe

that what he meant was that ‘a scrap of paper’ represented the _British_

idea of the value of a treaty, while Germany ‘took her responsibility

towards neutral States seriously.’ And Bethmann-Hollweg offered this

explanation after Germany had actually violated Belgian neutrality, and

Great Britain had gone to war to maintain it!

The German Chancellor offered, in the very same speech, yet another

explanation in open quarrel with the explanation just given. At the

time he described the treaty as ‘a scrap of paper,’ he had ‘reason

to believe,’ he told the Reichstag, that the Belgians themselves had

destroyed their own neutrality by a convention they had made with

England for the introduction of British troops; but as he lacked formal

proof of the circumstance, he did not mention it at the time. Since

then they had captured Brussels, and found, in the archives there, the

actual text of the convention with England, by which Belgium violated

its own neutrality. As a matter of fact, the guilty document which the

German Chancellor quoted was not a ‘convention’ at all, but notes of a

‘conversation’ betwixt the British military attaché and Major-General

Ducalme, a Belgian officer. It was an academic discussion of what might

be done ‘after Germany had entered Belgian territory’; and it was

endorsed as ‘not binding’ on either of the two nations. And the German

Chancellor quotes this discussion of what might be done to _guard_ its

neutrality against German attack as a _surrender_ of its neutrality.

This is very much as though a burglar, caught in the act of plundering a

house, claimed that his burglary was justifiable, as he found—_after_ he

had broken into the house—that its owner had a revolver under his pillow.

The doctrine of the freedom of the sea which Germany has suddenly begun

to preach at the top of its voice is yet another proof of either the

entire absence of any sense of humour in the German mind, or of a morbid

condition of the German conscience. For Great Britain, the geographical

distribution of her Empire makes an overwhelming superiority in naval

power a condition of its existence; but the seas of the planet, under

her supremacy, have been free to every flag—except the black flag of the

pirate. She has never abused her sea-power. It is Germany that has made

the sea terrible by sowing it with drifting mines and making it a field

for the performances of its submarines. Great Britain has supreme power

on the sea, Germany has—or _had_—supreme military power on land; and

what Germany means by ‘the freedom of the sea’ is that Great Britain’s

advantage should be cancelled out of existence, while her own advantage

should remain undiminished.

It is worth quoting the words in which, in his clear-cut, sword-edged

prose, Mr. A. J. Balfour analyses and describes this new German doctrine.

‘The most simple-minded,’ he says, ‘must feel suspicious when they find

that _these missionaries of maritime freedom are the very same persons

who preach and who practise upon the land the extremest doctrines of

military absolutism_.

‘She poses as a reformer of international law, though international law

has never bound her for an hour. She objects to “economic pressure”

when it is exercised by a fleet, though she sets no limit to the brutal

completeness with which economic pressure may be imposed by an army. She

sighs over the suffering which war imposes upon peaceful commerce, though

her own methods of dealing with peaceful commerce would have wrung the

conscience of Captain Kidd. She denounces the maritime methods of the

Allies, though in her efforts to defeat them she is deterred neither by

the rules of war, the appeal of humanity, nor the rights of neutrals.’

Now, when a Power like Germany, with such a record on the sea, attires

itself in the garb of a missionary, and begins to preach the gospel

of ‘the freedom of the sea,’ the phenomenon appeals to the literary

imagination by its exquisite absurdity; to the alienist it suggests the

urgent need of medical treatment.

That the Power which has scorched with fire and splashed red with blood

the little State it had sworn to protect, which sank the _Lusitania_ and

shot Nurse Cavell, should complain to high heaven that Great Britain

had broken the regulations of the Hague Convention, is an audacity

which paralyses the sane intelligence. It is as though Jack the Ripper

published a tract against vivisection, or Deeming wrote a pious homily on

‘How to Make Home Happy.’

Another illustration of this lunatic quality in the German mind is found

in the furious complaints against Great Britain for starving—or for even

_trying_ to starve—Germany, including its women and children. And yet it

was Germany that in 1870 drew lines of blockade around Paris, and waited

for starvation to bring the ‘gay city’ to surrender! No German city yet

has known the horrors of starvation as the German armies compelled Paris

to know them. The death-rate of little children during those sad months

rose to 5000 a week, and Bismarck, when he rode into Paris after its

surrender, expressed his surprise at seeing _any_ children yet alive. Von

Hindenburg, when told quite recently that Russian peasants were starving

in Poland, said ‘It is just as well that it should be so; we cannot make

war sentimentally.’ Then he repeated the formula which is the true credo

of every Prussian soldier: ‘_The more ruthlessly war is waged, the more

humane does it really become_; for that is the best way to bring it to a

rapid conclusion.’ But what more complete proof of the one-sidedness of

the German mind can be discovered than the fact, say, that at the present

moment it is itself starving Belgium, so that its inhabitants have to be

fed by the pity of the world, and at the same time it is screaming aloud

to the whole universe because the meat ration in Berlin has to be reduced

in consequence of the British blockade? The puzzle is not so much that

Germany acts with such gaping inconsistency; it has not the faintest

notion that it is inconsistent. This is a mental condition rare outside,

and not even always found _inside_, a lunatic asylum.

The delirious self-complacency of the Prussianised German, again, leaves

the whole outside world speechless. There is no other such instance of

megalomania in history. No other people pay such loud compliments to

themselves, and pay them with such unashamed diligence. They decorate

themselves with compliments as a savage decorates himself with bits of

broken glass. A philosopher like Hegel set the example of proclaiming

in German accents and to German ears the ‘godlike glory’ of the German

nation. The ‘spiritual nature of Germanism,’ we are assured seven days a

week by German editors, makes it the standard-bearer of Christian Europe.

Morality, we are warned, ‘depends on the preservation of the Christian

Germanic spirit and on the political power of Germany. Civilisation and

Christianity are unthinkable without the Germans.’

‘Germany,’ says Professor Lamprecht, ‘is now the protector and pillar

of European civilisation; and after bloody victories the world will be

healed by being Germanised.’ ‘We Germans are singled out by Providence to

march at the head of all _Kultur_ people.... We have the highest mental

creative gifts; we form the crown of _Kultur_ in the whole of creation.’

Can anyone doubt, after reading through pages like this, that Germany is

self-hypnotised? There must be some morbid condition in the character

which thus exudes compliments to itself through every pore in its skin.

It is the sign of a disordered intelligence.

The doctrine of ‘frightfulness,’ as a method in war, is the special

contribution of Germany to the present conflict. It is curious, however,

to remember that the most terrible example of ‘frightfulness,’ as far as

Europe is concerned, was supplied by Germany 300 years ago in the famous,

or rather infamous, Thirty Years’ War; and a chapter from its grim

pages reads like nothing so much as a page from the German performances

in Belgium in 1914-15. The slaughter in Germany during that period was

so huge that in 1648 the country had only a third of the population of

1618; in some districts the depopulation was so great that every man

was allowed to have _two_ wives! It is a German historian who says that

‘even now the injury done to the psychology of the German people by the

moral and intellectual decay of the Thirty Years’ War has hardly been

repaired.’ Those words were written before the present war broke out, but

there are some pages in the performances of Germany to-day that justify

that statement.

What makes the folly of Germany to-day absolutely unique, however, is

the fact that, in its adoption of ‘frightfulness’ as a war measure, it

takes the performances of the Thirty Years’ War, translates them into

modern terms, practises them on a new scale, and _enjoins_ them as

_virtues_! The German soldier is instructed, for reasons of humanity, to

be as inhuman as possible; and the German War Book gives grim details of

what can be done, and supports its instructions by logic which, if it

is dreadful, is certainly plausible. If war is made more frightful, it

is argued, it will be made shorter; so it is a service to humanity to

bombard defenceless towns, burn whole villages, shoot unarmed citizens,

including women and children. One German divine, indeed—and German

divines during this war have done and said some wonderful things—preached

a sermon to show that ‘frightfulness’ carried to the _n_th was a form—a

German form—of fulfilling the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour

as thyself.’ ‘If you love your neighbour, you will do your best to

prevent him being caught in the red tide of war—or to get him out of

it—as early as possible; and you will achieve this best by making war as

terrible as you can.’

The committee which inquired into German atrocities in Belgium, and is

responsible for the Bryce Report, had on it such shrewd, practical,

hard-headed men as Lord Bryce, Sir Edward Clarke, Sir Frederick Pollock,

and their report is the most dreadful indictment ever drawn up against

any nation, civilised or uncivilised.

It says: ‘In the minds of Prussian officers, war seems to have become a

sort of sacred mission, one of the highest functions of the omnipotent

State, which is itself as much an army as a State. Ordinary morality and

the ordinary sentiment of pity vanish in its presence, superseded by a

new standard which justifies to the soldier every means that can conduce

to success, however shocking to a natural sense of justice and humanity,

however revolting to his own feeling.... Cruelty becomes legitimate

when it promises victory.’ Then a very pregnant sentence is added: ‘It

is a specifically military doctrine, the outcome of a theory held by a

ruling caste who have brooded and thought and written and talked and

dreamed about war until they have fallen under its obsession, and been

hypnotised by its spirit.... If this explanation be the true one, the

mystery is solved, and that which seemed scarcely credible becomes more

intelligible, though not less pernicious.’

The use of ‘frightfulness’ as a method of war, in other words, is the

result of diseased psychological conditions. To have ‘brooded and

thought and written and talked and dreamed about war’ is a process which

might well result in an evil obsession as real, and as devilish in its

spirit and its fruits, as possession by the devil himself. But the

most astonishing thing in this whole astonishing story is that Germany

betrays no sense that it has done anything worthy of blame. It learns

with a bewildered exasperation that the outside world disapproves of this

example of German ‘culture.’ The Kaiser is quite sure that he has the

Divine approval in this, and everything else he does. From the wireless

station at Berlin an official ‘explanation’ of this stupendous crime of a

destroyed city was sent to the newspapers of the world:

‘The only means of preventing surprise attacks from the civil

population has been to interfere with unrelenting severity,

and to create examples which by their frightfulness would be a

warning to the whole country.’

Now, as an example of inverted ethics, this is almost worthy of a place

in De Quincey’s essay on ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.’

‘The German Government,’ says Secretary Hay, ‘is generally brutal, but

not often silly.’ Here, however, it is at once both silly and brutal in

a quite superlative degree. It is, of course, exactly this doctrine of

‘frightfulness’ which has made Germany the outlaw of the civilised world.

Perhaps nothing in this war will so sharply arrest what we have called

the literary imagination as the uncertainty, the dim half-lights as to

its reasons and issues, with which it began.

Some of the ‘explanations’ of the war are foolish; some are cynical. The

Hon. Bertrand Russell, for example, has written a book on the war in

which he says the nations of Central Europe are fighting for much the

same reason dogs do—because ‘_they don’t like each other’s smell_‘!

Would anyone quote now, as an explanation of the war, that couple of

pistol-shots in a street in Serajevo which slew the Archduke Franz

Ferdinand and his wife? It is like offering the bursting of a soda-water

bottle as the explanation of a Niagara, or tracing an earthquake to the

explosion of a cracker. The Austrian ultimatum to Servia seems to be the

match which fired the magazine; but if there had been no ‘magazine’ the

‘match’ would have been quite innocent.

For Great Britain, the first reason of the war was something immediate

and concrete—the German invasion of Belgium. Great Britain was pledged,

both by express treaty and by its historic policy, to maintain that

neutrality; and when the German columns crossed the Belgian frontier war

was inevitable. It was a simple question of good faith; England, Mr.

Asquith declared, must keep her pledged word. But when the war was begun

it was quickly realised that the existence of the Empire depended on

its result; and so Mr. Bonar Law told the House of Commons, ‘This is a

fight for our national existence.’ That is certainly true, and it applies

with greatest force to the Dominions. If the British Empire goes into

liquidation, the most coveted assets will be Australia, with its 12,000

miles of girdling sea, its radiant climate, its mineral wealth, its vast

pastures, or New Zealand, the Great Britain of the Pacific. The men in

the French and Flemish trenches are certainly fighting for—amongst other

things—the safety of every home in Australia and New Zealand. But the

war raised the question of the value of the treaty relations which bind

civilised States together; so, as Lord Rosebery put it, we are fighting

for ‘the sanctity of public law in Europe.’ A German victory would turn

every treaty throughout Christendom into a ‘scrap of paper.’ In the first

message, again, King George addressed to the Empire, he said, ‘We are

fighting for the continuity of civilisation;’ and _that_ also is true.

The defeat of the Allies would put not only Europe, but Christendom, back

into the Dark Ages.

In this way, as the war went on, its ‘reasons’ expanded: the obligation

of the pledged word; our national existence; the sanctity of public law;

the continuity of civilisation. Yet even these reasons all put together

are inadequate. There remains something in the war differentiating

it from any other ever fought; some intangible and invisible element

not easy to define. In his famous speech in the Guildhall Mr. Asquith

expressed this by saying ‘This is not so much a material as a spiritual

conflict.’ It is a conflict, in other words, not racial, political,

dynastic, or a mere wrestle of political ideals. It is a battle of

opposing ethical codes. We are fighting not merely a nation, but a

doctrine—something that steel cannot pierce nor high explosives wreck.

And it is a doctrine armed, disciplined, terrible; fighting with 17-inch

howitzers and poisonous gases, with submarines.

But what exactly is the ‘doctrine’ against which we are fighting? It is

customary to quote Nietzsche at this point, and find in his teaching

the germ of the ‘doctrine’ for which to-day Germany fights, and against

which the rest of the world is in arms. But for one thing it is difficult

to discover any single sustained and intelligible ‘doctrine’ in the

structure of Nietzsche’s works. He died in a lunatic asylum, and had a

strain of lunacy in his writings, if not in his blood, long before his

insanity came under medical treatment. He had a touch of genius, but

thin partitions divided his genius from madness. If Germany took its

creed from Nietzsche it would be not only furiously anti-Christian and

furiously atheistic, but even furiously non-moral. ‘Morality,’ Nietzsche

said, ‘ought to be shot at. Pangs of conscience were indecent.’ In that

dim realm into which his half-insane mind wandered—the ‘twilight of the

gods’—evil and good had no existence. As for Christianity, he called it

‘the greatest of all conceivable corruptions,’ the ‘one immortal blemish

of mankind.’ Jesus Christ, for Nietzsche, was ‘a knave, a charlatan.’

Everyone knows how Nietzsche took the Beatitudes and inverted them.

His creed combined the theology of a lunatic asylum with the ethics of

a gaol. Now the Germany against which the world is fighting to-day is

certainly not atheistic, and it at least thinks itself to be intensely

Christian.

What makes the tragedy of Germany in this war, the thing which puzzles

even those who are fighting against it, is the fact that Germany is

acting on a doctrine stranger and more terrible than Paganism itself. It

undertakes to be _both_ Christian and Pagan at the same time; Christian

in the individual life, Pagan as a nation. It has two eternally hostile

codes of ethics: one for the individual and the other for the State. As

a private citizen the German may be a Christian, and ought to be one;

but the moment he puts on a spike-helmet, or sits at a Government desk,

he strips himself of all Christian morals; vice and virtue change their

names for him. As a soldier he can clothe himself with ‘frightfulness’;

can rape, plunder, kill, burn, with the entire approval of his

official—that is to say, his Paganised—conscience. As a diplomatist,

he can lie and cheat and forswear himself, and leave his Christian

self-respect untouched. For Germany acts on the theory that the State is

a non-moral, predatory entity, for which the distinction betwixt good

and evil does not exist. It stands in no relation to God; it has no more

morals than a tiger; it acts on the law of the jungle. Might, in its

dreadful code, is right.

In the Prussianised Germany against which we are fighting we have, in

brief, a double personality. When it acts as a nation it undergoes a

transformation more terrible than that in R. L. Stevenson’s tale when

Dr. Jekyll turned into Mr. Hyde. All the separate individualities of

Germany melt into one gigantic Mr. Hyde—Mr. Hyde in a spike-helmet. Or,

to change the figure, they become the ‘great blond beast’ of Nietzsche,

lawless, predatory, invincible, the superman, a non-moral monster. The

supermen, says Nietzsche, ‘where a foreign country begins, revert to the

beast-of-prey conscience, like jubilant monsters who come with bravado

from a ghastly bout of murder, arson, rape, and torture.... The nation

becomes a magnificent blond brute, avidly rampant for spoil and victory.’

Treitschke, the little stone-deaf professor of history, proclaimed the

doctrine that the State is a non-moral entity, for which an ethical

code has no meaning. Bernhardi puts the matter more explicitly. ‘Jesus

Christ,’ he says, ‘came into the world to establish a society founded

on love; but that principle does not extend to the State’; in all that

concerns the State, Jesus Christ has no authority. His laws do not extend

to _that_ realm. When before in history have we this doctrine proclaimed

from the iron lips of 17-inch howitzers? Here lies the explanation of all

that puzzles us in the present war—the strange perversities discoverable

in German policy: its contempt for truth, its capacity for cruelty; its

blindness to moral distinctions. We are fighting with a nation which,

taken individually, believes itself to be Christian; but, taken as a

nation, it is by deliberate choice Pagan.

‘_They chose new gods ... then was war in the gate_;’ so runs an ancient

Hebrew psalm, explaining a dark page in a dark history. In those words,

cause and effect are set side by side. Germany has certainly chosen ‘a

new god’; a god of war; the god of high explosives, of poison gases,

of submarines; a god of material forces, of battles and bloodshed—as

ultimate arbiter in the struggle to spread the Pan-German ideal. Everyone

remembers how Nietzsche inverted the Beatitudes. ‘Blessed,’ he said,

‘are’—not the meek—but ‘the strong, for _they_ shall inherit the earth.’

‘Blessed are’—not the peacemakers—but ‘the war-makers, for they shall be

called the sons of Odin.’ Cramb said that in Europe two great spiritual

forces, Napoleon and Christ, oppose each other, and their conflict is

‘the most significant spiritual phenomenon of the twentieth century.’ He

adds that, in Germany, ‘Corsica has conquered Galilee’; Napoleon, or what

Napoleon represents, is worshipped; not Christ, or what Christ teaches.

But the Germans do not understand even the Napoleon they accept as their

ideal. That great master of the art of war himself said that ‘in war

moral forces were to material forces as three to one.’ It is true that

by ‘moral’ Napoleon did not exactly mean ‘ethical’; but the ethical is

an essential part of the moral. Germany forgets—or inverts—the ethical;

and that is the most fatal of blunders. For, as Carlyle teaches, this

is a world of facts, and the first condition of success in any realm is

fidelity to facts. And certainly the most important kinds of ‘facts’ are

in the ethical order. They have the quality of eternity in them. This

world has been so constructed by its Maker that a falsehood is in quarrel

with the very system of things, and the Prussianised Germany, which has

set the world in a flame with its greeds, and hates, and envies, is

fighting against the ‘system of things.’

We, on our part, have greater allies than the nations knitted to us

by formal treaties. With the change of a single word we can adopt

Wordsworth’s memorable lines:

‘... Thou hast great allies,

Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And Love, and man’s unconquerable mind.’

But in this war we have still mightier allies than these. All the forces

that make for truth, for humanity, for honour, for justice, for freedom,

are our allies. These are the enduring forces of the universe; and the

Maker and Ruler of these forces, of whose character they are the reflex

and of whose will they are the servants, is on our side too.