person or a people without civilization. Indeed, certain ancient
peoples known as barbarians had a high degree of luxury, civilization.
The Persians under the barbarian Xerxes were probably quite the equals
in the mechanics of civilization of the Greeks, and the Egyptians could
lay claim to a large amount of what even the Greeks considered culture.
The barbarian was a person or a nation without a spiritual sense in his
values. The barbarian was often strong, able, intelligent, "organized"
as we say, but he was incapable of self-government: the barbarian nations
were ruled despotically. Their position in the world depended upon the
force and the ability of the particular despot who got control of their
destinies. The barbarian peoples were often crude in what is called
fine art. They neither believed in nor practiced those amenities of daily
life which express themselves superficially in manners, more deeply in
sensitive inhibitions, nor those amenities of the soul which are known
as honor, justice, mercy. The barbarian despised as soft and degenerate
such persons as permitted themselves to be trammeled in their conduct by
non-utilitarian considerations. In his primitive state the barbarian's
instinct was to destroy what he could not understand; as he became more
sophisticated, his instinct was to imitate what he could not create.
What, above all, the barbarian cannot appreciate is the suave mean
of life, the ideal of individual human excellence, of a tempered
social control, the liberty of the individual within the fewest
possible restrictions to work out his own scheme of existence, his
own civilization. For the barbarian mind recognizes only two sorts
of beings--the master and the slave. One is a tyrant and the other
is a docile imitation of manhood. The barbarian never totally dies
from the world. In every race, in every nation, in every community
fine examples of the barbarian instinct, the barbarian philosophy
of existence can be found. I have known personally a great many
barbarians,--American life is full of them,--and my knowledge of
them, of their strengths and their limitations, has given me my
understanding of the modern German as manifested in this world war.
* * * * *
Real truth often underlies popular nomenclature. It is neither accident
nor a desire to abuse that has given the German the name of barbarian
in the Latin nations. Just as the Latin peoples are the inheritors of
Greek ideals, so the German peoples seem to be the active modern
protagonists of all that the Greeks meant by their term "barbarian."
The French before the war regarded the Germans as not wholly well-bred
persons, lacking in some of those niceties of feeling and conduct which
seemed to them important--"_parvenus_" as a French officer characterized
his feeling about the race, and added the descriptive adjective
"_sale_"--dirty. Since the war there has been ground into the French the
more awful inhumanities of which these _parvenus_ are capable. Therefore,
when they think of the German, there comes instinctively to their lips
the ancient term of complete distinction,--_les barbares_,--by which is
meant a person and a nation who are not governed by ideals of taste,
honor, humanity, what to the non-barbarian are summed up in the one
word "decency." The adjective that the officer used--"_sale_"--does
not imply necessarily literal physical dirt, but a moral callousness
and unrefinement of soul which in the spiritual realm corresponds with
the term "dirty" in the physical. He sees the soul of the German as a
dirty soul, unclean, unsqueamish. And this conception of the enemy has
given to the French soldier something of that crusader spirit which has
sustained him through his terrible conflict. As M. Émile Hovelaque has
expressed it,--"France is fighting the battle of humanity, of the world,
of America, of every nation, man, and child who are resolved to live
their own life in their own way, under the dictates of their conscience,
within the limits of the laws they have accepted." The battle of the
world to push back once more the pest of barbarism! It is that which
has roused French chivalry, French heroism, not merely the love of
the _patrie_. Indeed, for the higher spirits the _patrie_ is closely
identified with the non-barbaric ideals of humanity.
* * * * *
The whole conscious world has had the manifestations of the new
barbarism before its eyes for an entire year and more. It has recoiled
in disgust from the invasion of Belgium, the sinking of the Lusitania,
the shooting of Edith Cavell, from the wanton destruction of monuments.
All these barbarities are indisputable facts, which may be explained
and extenuated, but cannot be denied. There is another class of
barbarities,--the so-called "atrocities,"--which are more easily denied,
but which most people who have taken the trouble to examine the charges
know to be equally true. The record of these multiplied atrocities is
so enormous and so well authenticated that it would seem to me useless
to add any words to the theme were it not for an amazing attitude of
indifference to the subject on the part of many Americans. "We don't
want to hear any more atrocity stories," they say. "Perhaps the
atrocities have been exaggerated, probably there's truth on both sides.
Anyway, war is brutal as every one knows." Some newspapers will not
publish the atrocity charges, whether because of our popular prejudice
against anything "unpleasant" unless freshly sensational or because of
more sinister reasons, the reader may judge.
This attitude is both evasive and cowardly. It is essential to
understand the atrocity for a proper realization of the war and of
the German menace. It is false to say that all war is barbarous, and
that in every war similar atrocities have occurred. As Mr. Hilaire
Belloc has well said,--"Men have often talked during this war ... as
though the crime accompanying Prussian activities in the field were
normal to warfare.... It is of the very first importance to appreciate
the truth that Prussia in this campaign has postulated in one point
after another new doctrines which repudiate everything her neighbors
have held sacred from the time when a common Christianity first began
to influence the states of Europe. The violation of the Belgian
territory is on a par with the murder of civilians in cold blood, and
after admission of their innocence, with the massacre of priests and
the sinking without warning of unarmed ships with their passengers and
crews. To regard these things as something normal to warfare in the past
is as monstrous an historical error as it would be to regard the Reign
of Terror during the French Revolution as normal to civil disputes
within the states."
It is the business of every person who is concerned about anything
more than his own selfish fate to examine into the atrocity charges
and to convince himself, not only of the truth, but of the more serious
implications in their premeditated and persistent character. The record
has been well made, fortunately, often in judicial form. It is already
voluminous and being added to constantly. Best of all the evidence,
perhaps, are the German diaries of soldiers and officers, extracts of
which have been edited by Professor Bédier, of the Collège de France,
with facsimile photographs of the texts. Next I should place in evidence
the so-called German "War Book" ("Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege"), where
under the convenient title of "Indispensable Severities" may be found
the text for many of the worst atrocities committed in Belgium and
France.
If the atrocity charge against the Germans is false or exaggerated,
it is surely time to know it, but no mere denial or general argument
can be accepted in rebuttal. The world must convince itself of the
truth. The German crimes have been too many and too public, too well
authenticated by witnesses to be disproved by mere denial. The best
public opinion of the world has condemned military Germany as a
barbarous outlaw. The crimes committed with the connivance of the
supreme military authorities, authorized by their instructions to
their officers, have fouled the name German for eternity: it will
be coupled with Vandal, Tartar, Barbarian.
* * * * *
I believe the atrocity charges to be substantially true in a vast
majority of cases. Moreover, I do not believe that half the truth of
them has been told or ever will be. My reasons for this belief in the
atrocity charge are the following: First, undisputed crimes, such as
the Lusitania and Cavell cases. A government that would sanction these
murders would sanction all other atrocities. Second, the witness of
persons in whose credibility I have confidence, such as French officers
and civilians, nurses and doctors, whose occupations have thrown
first-hand evidence in their way, who have personal knowledge of
specific outrages. Third, from what I myself gathered while I was in
France from the lips of abused persons. Although I did not look for
atrocities, I could not avoid getting reports from such people as I
met in the devastated territory of the Marne, weighing their stories,
and estimating the validity of them.
I believe in the truthfulness of that abbé of Esternay, who was one
of the unfortunates that the Germans used as a screen before the
operations of a body of troops. I believe in the truthfulness of the
keen old peasant woman at Châtillon, whose home had been riddled by
German bullets and who had been fired at when she took refuge in the
cellar of her house, and of many others with whom I talked of their
experiences during the early days of September, 1914. Unfortunately,
there was no photographer at work those days along the Marne valley,
though no doubt the German denying office would instantly impugn the
evidence of a photograph of the act. Each one of us, however, has his
own inner instinctive tests of truth to which he puts the credibility
of a story, and I believe the abbé, the old woman, and many others
who suffered abominably at the hands of German soldiers.
One fact only too evident to anybody who has followed in German
footsteps through the valley of the Marne is the part that mere
drunkenness had in this affair. The flower of the German army was
incredibly drunken throughout the advance into France. Pillage, rape,
incendiarism followed inevitably. They are common crimes to be expected
where an exhausted soldiery is inflamed with drink. But the cowardly
slaughter of non-combatants, the wanton destruction of monuments, the
brutal tyrannies toward conquered peoples--these are the blacker crimes
against the German name.
* * * * *
Self-control is not a Teutonic ideal. Of all the psychological surprises
that the war has revealed, the exhibition of the German temperament has
not been one of the least. Not its frank philosophic materialism, which
any one who had followed the drift of German thought and literature might
have expected, but its extraordinary lack of self-control. English and
Americans are taught that an individual who cannot master his own temper
is unfit to master others. Yet here is a people pretending to world rule
whose tempers individually are so little under control that they explode
in senseless passion on the least provocation. The German nation froths
with hate first against the English because they were neither as cowardly
nor selfish as had been expected, then against the Italians because they
would not listen to Prince von Bülow's song, latterly against Americans
because the United States dared to question the divine right of Germany
to do with neutrals what she pleased. Judging from the German press and
from the Germans whom I have met, the German nation is living in a
ferment of rage, all the more extraordinary as the fighting seems to
have gone their way thus far. What would happen to this uncontrolled
people should the war take an unfavorable turn and not supply them with
daily victories? Self-control is not included in that famous German
discipline. Uncontrolled tempers, drink, the ordinary fund of brutality
in the pit of human beings with the extraordinary conditions of war
will explain much of all this barbarism--but not all.
The supreme evidence of German atrocities is to be found in the
infamous "Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege," a singular revelation of
national character in which the German general staff has summed
up for young officers the principles that should govern the conduct
of invading armies. One finds here,--"By steeping himself in military
history an officer will be able to guard himself against excessive
humanitarian notions; it will teach him that certain severities
are indispensable to war, nay, more, that the only true humanity
very often lies in a ruthless application of them." This convenient
generalization covers the multitude of Belgian crimes. This interesting
manual of conduct for officers further warns against "sentimentalism
and flabby emotion," such as are embodied in the Hague Conventions,
and after stating the generally accepted rule or custom of warfare
warns that exceptions are always permissible where the officer deems
exceptional severities are "indispensable." After perusing the
"Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege," need one seek more evidence of German
atrocities from the levying of confiscatory fines upon conquered
peoples to the use of noncombatants as human screens in military
operations? The germ of the barbarous system is there contained in
its entirety.
* * * * *
But the implication of all this is much deeper than might appear on the
surface. Such a theory of warfare as is set forth in the "War Book," as
has been exemplified throughout the war, having its climax to date in
the murder of Edith Cavell, is not the result of uncontrolled passions
wrought to ferocity. It is deliberate, preconceived, defended,--an
article of faith intimately bound up with the German ideal of the state.
There is the danger. That the precept of the higher military authorities
is accepted by the general public may be seen in the following passage
from the Hamburg "Fremdenblatt"--or is it but a press note inserted by
the high commandment? "Toxic gases are simply a new instrument of
warfare; they are condemned because they are not universally adopted....
In warfare humanity does not exist and cannot exist. All the lucubrations
of the Hague Conferences on this subject are childish babbling. New
technical knowledge gives new arms to those who are not fools and know
how to use them.... Knowledge creates power, power creates law, law
creates humanity. All these are changing ideas and Germans are not
disposed to discuss them during the war."
An Indian on the warpath scalps, burns, tortures, and we say it is
the Indian nature to do these things. So-called civilized white men
have gone on the loose in and out of war and have done many shameful
deeds: we blush for them and draw the veil. But what never before has
been accomplished is to have barbarism deliberately inculcated as
part of the policy of warfare by a so-called civilized state; also
warfare considered to be the flower of statecraft. Clausewitz lays
down the principle that war is the legitimate carrying-out of state
policy; the state relies upon war to execute its designs. The German
military authorities announce and print for the use of their officers
that in war deviation from any recognized principle of conduct is
permitted under the excuse of "indispensable severity"--for the sake
of terrorizing hostile peoples--and humanitarianism is condemned as
"sentimentalism and flabby emotion."
There we have the gist of the whole affair--what makes the Frenchman
instinctively consider the German to be a barbarian, what makes modern
Germany the menace of the entire world. It is not its militaristic
ideals, its mechanical civilization, not even its brutality and
vulgarity, not even the ferocity of its warfare: it is the methodical
application of this underlying principle of conduct which has been
inculcated into the people so that they rejoice at the sinking of the
Lusitania, which has been employed in this war systematically from the
first day. This is the barbarian essence of the German character.
It is not the raping of women, not the staff officers' drunken
orgies in châteaux, not the looting and burning of houses, not the
stupid treatment of Belgians and French "hostages," etc. All these
are distressing but not necessarily characteristic. It is the principle
of the legitimacy of evil provided only that evil works to the advantage
of the German state. That is the vicious term in the German syllogism.
The state can do no wrong: therefore the individual acting for the state
can do no wrong. The one supreme end sanctioned by divine authority is
the endurance and the magnification of the German state. Whatever a
German may do or cause to be done with this holy end in view is not
merely just and reasonable, but necessary and praiseworthy. Hence there
follows, naturally, the vile system of German espionage, of propaganda
in neutral countries, the indiscriminate use of the submarine weapon,
terrorization, military murders of civilians, and all the rest of the
long count against Germany. Assume the vital major premise and the rest
follows inevitably, provided her citizens are both docile and have a
natural fund of brutality.
* * * * *
"In warfare humanity does not exist and cannot exist. All the
lucubrations of the Hague Conferences on this subject are childish
babbling.... Knowledge creates power, power creates law, law creates
humanity. All these are changing ideas."
The world has known the barbarian always; we are all acquainted with
him from personal experience. But the world has never before known a
reasoned, intellectual barbarism, a barbarian that has elevated into
a philosophy of human life with the sanctions of religion his instincts
and impulses. And that is the menace of the German, not his force nor
his brutality, but the risk that he can successfully impose upon the
world such an atrocious creed, intimidating into imitation those cowardly
souls whom he does not care to conquer. If Germany were to win this war,
it would not be her bumptious aggression that the world ought to fear
so much as the enormous impulse it would give to her detestable creed,
to the principle of evil in the world. The danger for us Americans is
greater than for others, not because of exposed coasts and an unprepared
army, but because we are already tainted with the same raw materialism
of belief. Too many individuals in America would find a sympathetic
echo in their own hearts to the German creed of collective selfishness
and barbarism.
* * * * *
One heard in Paris surprisingly little about German atrocities, less
than in Boston and New York, much less than in London. Not that the
French do not believe them: they know the bitter truth about German
inhumanity as none others. With that admirable stoicism and lucid
conservation of moral force displayed by the French from the beginning,
they do not waste their strength in denunciation: they have accepted
it as one of the terrible aspects of the evil they are fighting. They
probably understand the German character as now wholly revealed better
than the rest of the world and are not so much surprised by its
manifestations. They have examined the German, and have fortified
themselves against his cruel power.
But they cannot forget these incredible outrages. There are too many
fresh examples--too many robbed and maltreated refugees, too many
fatherless and motherless children, still coming to Paris by the
trainload, whom they must provide for, too many relatives and friends
who have been abused and murdered or whose property has been looted
by German soldiers and officers. Also there are too many Frenchmen
who have seen the horrors with their own eyes, too many doctors and
stretcher-bearers shot down by those they were trying to aid, too many
hospitals bombarded, too many wounded prisoners killed. The German
atrocity is documented in France over and over, within the knowledge
of millions. It will prove to be Germany's great stumbling-block after
the war, when she looks about a shocked world for peoples to trade with.
* * * * *
In the dining-room of the military club at Commercy, where a corps
of the French army now has its headquarters, there is a wall painting
of the last century representing the heroic deeds of Jeanne d'Arc.
"That," said General C., pointing to the little figure on horseback,
"is French! And the French have fought this war chivalrously--not
against monuments, against women and children and old people, but
as soldiers against soldiers!"
The Latin is sometimes cruel--he has within him the capacity for
cruelty--and the history of Latin peoples is stained here and there
with ferocity. But the Latin has never organized cruelty methodically,
has never elevated terrorization into a principle of warfare, a weapon
of statecraft. For one thing he is too intelligent: he knows that
cruelty begets reprisals, that brutality breeds hate. After Alsace
the German should have known too much to try the same method in harsher
forms upon Belgium and invaded France. But the barbarian learns no
spiritual lessons. Persian atrocity, Saracen atrocity, Indian atrocity,
Spanish atrocity--they have all failed. An enduring triumph was never
won on that principle of "indispensable severity."
It is barbarism as well as the barbarian which France is fighting,
and the French know it, are profoundly conscious of it, from the
cool, dispassionate philosopher, like Bergson or Boutroux or Hovelaque,
to the girl conductor on the tram, the dirty _poilu_ in the trench.
For more than a generation the French world has suffered from the
fear of this new barbarian, and the time has come again, as it has
come so many times before in history, for the momentous decision with
the barbarian. Again as before it must come on the fields of France
where the ancient curse of barbarism has been met and destroyed.
IV
_The German Lesson_
The barbarian must be met on his own ground of force and efficiency,--"an
eye for an eye," not with arguments or apologies, not even with numbers
or wealth. The vital question for us all to-day is not how unprepared the
Allies were for the onslaught of barbarism, but how far they have overcome
their handicap, how thoroughly they have learned the barbarian's lesson.
The varying degrees in which the different allied nations have grasped
the meaning of the lesson and applied it tell us not merely their chance
of survival, but also the probable outcome of the world decision. What
that lesson is which Germany is teaching the world by blood and iron is
a byword on men's tongues to-day: the value of it is another question.
* * * * *
Long before the war, Germany had published far and wide her scorn
of her enemies. The Russians were an undisciplined barbarian horde;
the English, stupid idlers who spent on their sport the energy that
the industrious German devoted to preparing himself for world rule.
As for the French, they were an amiable and amusing people, but
degenerate--fickle, feeble, rotten with disease. Germany's hate
was reserved for the English, her most ignoble slurs for the French.
Needless to say, Germany has not found any one of her many enemies as
wholly despicable as she had imagined them to be. Her miscalculations
were greatest with France. That the French people are smaller in
stature than the German, that they eat less and breed less, that by
temperament they are cheerful and gay and witty convinced the dull
German mind that the race had become degenerate and trivial,--negligible.
This habit of contemptuously attributing to other peoples vileness and
degeneracy because their social ideals differ from her own is part of
that lack of imagination which is the Teuton's undoing.