IN WHICH WE DISCOVER "A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH"
Finally our talk left the war and its meaning, and we fell to
wondering how the Young Doctor's hand was coming on, and we thought
of the Eager Soul, too, standing so wistfully between love and
death and the picture of the Young Doctor sitting in the garden
among the flowers of early autumn, more poet than soldier or
doctor, came to both of us as we talked and then Henry stooped to
the floor and picked up two folded sheets of paper. Clearly they had
dropped from the envelope sent to us by the Eager Soul. He opened
one and remarked:
"Why, Bill, it's poetry. She's written here on the margin, 'Verses
by our Doctor friend. I thought you'd like to see them. See other
sheet for melody to suit. It was the melody he tried to whistle
that night. He wrote them for me to fit the Doctor's words.'"
Then Henry unfolded the other sheet; and there, sure enough, was
the air, evidently copied by the girl from the melody written by
the Gilded Youth. And clearly it was the theme of the Tschaicovski
melody from the first movement of the Sixth Symphony, that dominated
the air.[Footnote: For the melody which the Gilded Youth wrote to
the Young Doctor's verses the reader should see appendix "A."] The
fine thoroughbred nerve of him, trying to signal that air back to
her, and to play the game of courage to us! Henry read the verses;
they were headed "A Soldier's Song." They were very much such rhymes
as we wrote when we were young. They ran:
Love, though these hands, that rest in thine so dear,
Back into dust may crumble with the year;
Love, though these lips, that meet thy lips so true,
Soon may be grass that stores the morning dew--
O Love, know well, that this fond heart of mine,
It shall be always, always--thine!
Love, though our dreams shall have no hope but this;
Love, though our faith shall be our rarest bliss;
Love, though the years may bring their death and chill,
Love, though our blood shall lose its passion, still--
Still, Love, know well that this heart is divine,
It shall be always--always, thine!
Henry sat holding the sheet and looking through the wall of the
room in Buckland's hotel across twenty years, down an elm-shaded
path in the little town of Baldwin, Kansas--thousands of miles and
seemingly thousands of years away!
"Well," he sighed. "In the note here she's got her he's badly mixed.
But we know what she means. And I don't blame them; any boy in his
twenties ought to go singing, with one voice or another, after such
a girl!"
And then we knew what the Young Doctor was doing there in the garden
among the adoring flowers. He was writing those verses. And, we
in our forties, after such things have passed, were sitting in a
commonplace room in a comfortable hotel, five hundred miles from the
battle and twenty years from the primrose path, trying to imagine
it all. And like Stephen Blackpool in Dickens' "Hard Times" about
all we could make of it was that it was a mess! They were both so
remote, the love affair that had followed us over Europe, and the
war which we had followed so wearily. The love affair was of course
a look backward, for us, to days "when lutes were touched and songs
were sung"; but the war and all its significance stretched ahead.
It portended change. For change always follows war.
Yet life, in spite of the current of war twisting so many things
askew, does proceed in England calmly, and in something like order.
As we looked back upon our London experience it seemed to Henry
and me that we were hurrying from luncheons to teas and teas to
dinners and from dinners to the second act of good shows all the
time. For in London we had no Red Cross duties. We were on our way
home, and people were kind to us, and best of all we could speak
the language--after a fashion--and understand in a general way
what was going on. We had dined at two American embassies on the
continent and had worn our tail coats. Of course Red Cross uniforms
were proper evening regalia at any social function. But someway a
flannel shirt and a four-in-hand tie--even a khaki coloured tie,
did not seem to Henry and me de rigueur. We weren't raised that
way and we couldn't come to it. So we wore our tails. We noticed in
France and Italy that other men wore dinner coats, and we bemoaned
our stupidity in bringing our tails and leaving our dinner coats
in New York. We fancied in our blindness that on the continent no
one noticed the difference. But in England, there doubt disappeared.
Whenever we went to an English dinner, in our tails, some English
ladyship through a lorgnette or a spyglass of some kind gave us
the once-over with the rough blade of her social disapproval and
we felt like prize boobs suddenly kidnapped from a tacky party
and dropped into a grand ball. But we couldn't help it. How should
we have known, without our wives to pack our trunks for us in New
York, that tails had atrophied in European society and that uniforms
and dinner coats had taken their place.
But other things have disappeared from Great Britain since
war began, and Henry was doomed to walk the island vainly looking
for the famed foods of old England. All through Italy and France,
where onion soup and various pastes were served to us, Henry ate
them, but in a fond hope that when we got to England he would have
some of the "superior comestibles" which a true lover of Dickens
had a right to expect. The French were given to ragouts and Latin
translations of Mulligan stews, and braised veal smothered in
onions and carrots and a lot of staple and fancy green groceries,
and these messed dishes irritated Henry. He is the kind of an
old-fashioned man who likes to take his food straight. If he eats
onions, he demands that they shall be called onions, or if they serve
him carrots, he must know specifically that he is eating carrots,
and he wants his potatoes, mashed, baked, boiled, or fried and no
nonsense about it. Similarly he wants his veal served by itself, and
when they bring him a smoking brown casserole of browned vegetables,
browned gravy and browned meat, he pokes his fork into it, sniffs,
"another cat mess," pushes it aside and asks for eatable food! So
all over the continent he was bragging about what he was going to
do to "the roast beef of old England," and was getting ready for
Yorkshire pudding with it. It was sweet to hear Henry's honest
bark at spaghetti and fish-salads, bay deep-mouthed welcome to Sam
Weller's "'am and weal pie," and even Pickwick's "chops and tomato
sauce," and David Copperfield's toasted muffins, as we drew near
the chalk cliffs of England. Also he was going to find what an "eel
pie" was, and he had a dozen Dickensonian dishes that he proposed
to explore, dishes whose very names would make a wooden Indian's
mouth water. But when he got there the cupboard was bare. England
was going on rations. Fats were scarce, sugars were rare, starches
were controlled by the food board. And who could make a currant
tart without these? He dropped two bullet-sized brown biscuits with
a hazelnut of butter under his vest the first three minutes of our
first breakfast and asked for another round, after he had taken
mine.
[Illustration: And we felt like prize boobs suddenly kidnapped from
a tacky party and dropped into a grand ball]
"That's your allowance, sir," said the waitress, and money would
buy no more.
He noticed a cube of sugar by his coffee cup; that was his allowance
of sugar. We went out to lunch. Henry ordered the roast beef of old
England at the best club in London and got a pink shaving, escorted
in by two boiled potatoes and a hunk of green cabbage, boiled
without salt or pork. And for dessert we had a sugarless, lardless
whole-wheat-flour tart! It puckered his mouth like a persimmon. It
fell to me to explain to Mr. H. G. Wells, who gave the luncheon,
that Henry had just come from the continent, where he had scorned
the food, and one could see from the twinkle in Mr. Wells's eyes
that he was going to put Henry in a book. And he certainly was
a hero during those London days--the hero of a great disillusion.
Of course the British cooking was good. The English are splendid
cooks, and they were doing their best; but Henry's picture of the
great boar's head triumphantly borne into the hall on the shoulders
of four stout butlers, and his notion of the blazing plum pudding
as large as a hassock, and his preconceived idea of England as
Dickens's fat boy forever stuffing and going to sleep again, had to
be entirely revised. For if the English are proud of the way they
conceal the bitterness of their sorrow in this war, also they have
a vast pride in the way they are sacrificing their creature comforts
for it. In Latin countries there is more or less special privilege.
But in England, the law is the law and men glory in its rigours
by obeying it in proud self-sacrifice. If our dinners sometimes
were Spartan in simplicity we found the talk ample, refreshing and
filling. We, however, had some trouble with our "Who's Who." One
evening they sat me opposite a handsome military man who talked of
airships and things most wonderfully and it took me three days to
learn that he was the authority on air fighting in Europe! He was
a Lord of somewhere, and Earl of something and a Duke of somewhat--all
rolled into one. Henry hooted at me for two days. But finally he
gave me some comfort. "At least," he said, "you are as well-known
in London as your Duke's mixture is in Emporia, and London is a
bigger town!" Then it came Henry's turn. At our very grandest dinner
they sat Henry between Lord Bryce and one of the most distinguished
men of contemporary English letters. Henry shone that night as he
never shone before and when Henry turns on his talk he is a wizard.
Meredith Nicholson, who has heard Henry talk at a dinner, in a
recent number of Scribner's magazine, said of him: "He's the best
talker I've ever heard. It was delightful to listen to discourse so
free, so graphic in its characterization, so coloured and flavoured
with the very soil," and that night at the English dinner, all
of Henry's cylinders were hitting and he took every grade without
changing gears. But my ears were eager for the man on Henry's right.
He told some stories; my neck craned toward them. Henry returned
the Scotch stories with Kansas stories and held the table.
Then going home in the taxi Henry, recalling his dinner companion,
said: "Bill, who was that little man on my left, that man they
called Barrie!"
It seemed impossible. Yet those were Henry's very words.
"Henry, Henry, have you never heard of 'Peter Pan,' nor 'The Little
Minister,' nor 'Sentimental'--" his friend's answer got no further.
Henry's snort of shame almost stopped the taxi.
"No, Bill--no--not that. Well, for Heaven's sake! and I sat by him
all evening braying like a jack. Bill--Bill, you won't ever tell
this in Wichita, will you?"
So it must remain forever a secret!
That was a joyful hour for me, but the next day, Henry had his
laugh. We came in from tea and found a card on the table in the
snug little room near the elevator, which passes for a hotel office
in London. The card was from Lord Bryce inviting us to tea the
next afternoon. It fell to Henry's lot to go out for the day in
the country, and to me to lunch with Granville Barker. So half-past
four saw me rushing into the hotel from a taxi, which stood waiting
outside, and throbbing up a two-pence every minute. Then this
dialogue occurred.
From me: "Is Mr. Allen in his room?"
From the hall boy: "He is, sir; shall I go for him, sir?"
From me: "If you will, please, and tell him I'm in an ungodly hurry,
and we have a taxi at the door chewing up money like a cornsheller!"
The hall boy had to find someone to go on watch. Time was moving.
The tea was at five. The Bryce apartment was a mile away, and
the chug of that taxi by the door moved me impulsively toward the
elevator. But the elevator was still three steps away, when the
manager of the hotel sauntered out from a side door, looked me over
leisurely, and asked blandly:
"You'll be going to tea with Lord Bryce this afternoon--I presume!"
My hand was on the elevator button jabbing it fiercely, and my
lips replied, "Yes--yes--say--Do you know whether Mr. Allen is in
our room? It is getting late and he must hurry or--"
The manager continued to look me over still leisurely, then he
smiled persuasively, but spoke firmly; realizing that something
would have to be done for the good name of his hotel: "Well now,
sir, you wouldn't be wearing those brown shoes to Lord Bryce's tea,
would you, Mr. White?" And while that taxi ground out two shillings,
black shoes slowly but nervously enveloped two Emporia feet, while
Henry stood by and chortled in ghoulish Wichita glee!
But if we made a rather poor fist of our social diversions, at
least we had a splendid time at the London shows. And then there
was always the prospect of an exciting adventure getting home after
the performance was over. The hotel generally found a taxi which
took us to the theater. But once there we had to skirmish for
ourselves and London is a big town, and hundreds of thousands of
Londoners are hunting taxis at eleven at night, and they are hard
to catch. So we generally had the fun of walking back to Brook Street
in the dark. And it is dark in London toward midnight. Paris is
merely gloomy. Rome is a bit somber, but London is as black as the
inside of your hat. For London has been bombed and bombed by the
German airmen, until London in the prevailing mist which threatens
fog becomes mere murk. Night after night we wandered the crooked
streets inquiring our way of strangers, some of whom were worse lost
than we; one night we took a Londoner in charge and piloted him to
Leicester Square; and then got lost ourselves finding Piccadilly
and Regent Street! So that whenever we went out after dinner we were
never without dramatic excitement, even if it was not adequately
supplied by the show. The London taste in shows seems to sheer
away from the war. In the autumn last past but two shows had a
war motive: One "General Post," a story of the fall of caste from
English life during the war, telling how a tailor became a general;
the other "The Better 'Ole," a farce comedy, with a few musical
skits in it, staged entirely "at the front." "The Better 'Ole"
could be put on in any American town and the fun would raise the
roof! There is no story to it; the show is but a series of dialogues
to illustrate Bairnsfather's cartoons.
[Illustration: "Well now, Sir, you wouldn't be wearing those brown
shoes to Lord Bryce's tea, would you, Mr. White?"]
A soldier comes splashing down the trench. His comrade cries, "Say,
Alf, take yer muddy feet out o' the only water we got to sleep in."
Again a soldier squats shivering with fear in a shell hole, while
the bombs are crashing over him, and dirt threatens to bury him. A
comrade looks in and to his captious remarks the squatting soldier
answers, "If you knows where there's a better 'ole, go to it!"
Three men seated on a plum jam box during a terrific bombardment.
Trees are falling, buildings crumbling, the landscape heaving, and
Bert says, "Alf--we'll miss this old war wen it's over!" As the
shells strike nearer and nearer and a great crater yawns at their
feet they crawl into it, are all but buried alive by the dirt from
another shell, and Bert exclaims, "Say, Alf, scare me--I got the
'iccoughs!" And so it goes for a whole evening, while Bert, making
love to an interminable string of girls at each place where he is
billeted at the front, gives away scores of precious lockets with
his mother's hair in them, and Alf tries forever, unavailingly, to
make his cigarette lighter work, and Old Bill dreams of his wife
at home who keeps a "pub"!
The prohibitionist in America would probably insist that she keep
a soda fountain or a woman's exchange; but no other alterations
would be needed to get the play over the footlights in any English
speaking town on the globe.
The British soldiers crowd the house where "The Better 'Ole"
is given, but their friends don't like it. The raw rollick of the
game with death, which is really Shakespearean in its directness
and its horse play--like the talk of the soldiers in "Henry IV" or
the chaffing of the grave-diggers in "Hamlet," or the common people
in any of Shakespeare's plays, offends the British home-staying
sense of propriety, and old ladies and gentlemen write to the Times
about it. But the boys in khaki jam the theater and howl their
approval.
Curiously enough in musical programs one finds no prejudice against
German music in London as one finds it in Paris. To get Beethoven
in Paris one had to lower the windows, close the shutters, pull down
the shades and pin the curtains tight. At the symphony concerts in
London one can hear not only Beethoven, but Wagner, who is almost
modern in his aggressive Teutonism. But the English have little
music of their own, and so long as they have to be borrowing they
seem to borrow impartially of all their neighbours, the French,
the Slavs, the Germans, and the Italians. Indeed, even when British
opinion of Russia was at its ebb, the London Symphony Orchestra
put in an afternoon with Tschaicovsky's Fourth Symphony. And yet
if, in a few months we could form even a vague notion of the public
minds of England, and of France, one might say that England seemed
more implacable than France. In France, where one heard no music but
French and Italian music in the concerts, at the parks, in opera,
one heard a serious discussion going on among school teachers about
the history to be taught after the war.
Said one side: "Let's tell the truth about this war and its horrors.
Let's tell of murdered women and children, of ravished homes, of
pillaged cities, of country-sides scourged clear down to their very
milestones! Let's tell how German rapacity for land began the war,
and kept it up to its awful end."
Says the other side: "Germany is our permanent neighbour. Our
children will have to live with Germany, and our children's children
to the end of time. War is a horrible thing. Hate breeds war. Why
not then let the story of this war and its barbarities die with
this generation? Why should we for ever breed hate into the heart
of our people to grow eternally into war?"
England has no such questions in her mind. England will surely tell
the truth and defy the devil. But the Briton in matters of music
and the other arts is like 'Omer when he "smote 'is bloomin' lyre";
the Briton also will go and take what he may require, without much
sentiment in the matter.
But the things that roll off the laps of the gods, after humanity
has put its destinies there, sometimes are startlingly different
from the expected fruits of victory. We fight a war for one thing,
win the war and get quite another thing. The great war now waging
began in a dispute over spheres of influence, market extensions,
Places in the Sun and Heaven knows what of that sort of considerations.
Great changes in these matters, of course, must come out of the
war. But boundaries and markets will fluctuate with the decades
and centuries. The important changes that will come out of this
war--assuming that the Allies win it--will be found in the changed
relations of men. The changes will be social and economic and they
will be institutional and lasting. For generally speaking, such
changes as approach a fair adjustment of the complaints of the "have
nots" against the "haves" in life, are permanent changes. Kings,
overlords, potentates, politicians, capitalists, high priests--masters
of various kinds--find it difficult to regain lost privileges and
perquisites. And in this war Germany stands clearly for the "haves."
If Germany wins, autocracy will hood its losing ground all over
the world. For the same autocracy in Berlin lives in Wall Street,
and in the "city" in London, and in the caste and class interests
of Italy and France. But junkerdom in Germany alone among the nations
of the earth rests on the divine right of kings that is the last
resort of privilege. In America we have the democratic weapons to
break up our plutocracy whenever we desire to do so. In England
they are breaking up their caste and economic privileged classes
rapidly. In France and Italy junkerdom is a motheaten relic. And
when junkerdom in Germany is crushed, then at least the world may
begin the new era, may indeed begin to fight itself free. In the
lands of the Allies the autocracy will be weakened by an allied
victory. In Germany the junkers will be strong if they win the
war, and their strength will revive junkerism all over the earth.
If the Allies win, it will weaken junkerdom everywhere. Germany, it
is true, treats her working classes better than some of the Allies
treat their working people. But it is with the devilish wisdom of
a wise slaveholder, who sees profit in fat slaves. The workers get
certain legal bonuses. They have economic privileges, not democratic
rights of free men under German rule. And the roaring of the big
guns out at the front, seemed to Henry and me to be the crashing
walls of privilege in the earth.
Of course in this war, while some of the strange things one sees
and hears in Europe may pass with the dawn of peace--woman, for
instance, may return indoors and come out only on election day,
yet unquestionably most of the changes in economic adjustment have
come to stay. They are the most important salvage that will come
out of the wreck and waste of this war. In England, for instance,
the new ballot reform laws are fundamental changes. They provide
virtually for universal manhood suffrage and suffrage for women
over thirty upon something of the same terms as those provided for
men. So revolutionary are the political changes in England that
after the war, it is expected--conceded is hardly too strong a
word, that the first political cabinet to arise after the coalition
cabinet goes, will be a labour cabinet. Certainly if labour does
not actually dominate the British government, labour will control
it indirectly. And the labour gains during the war will not be
lost. Wages in England, and for that matter in most of the allied
countries are now being regulated by state ordinance and not by
competitive rates. "The labour market" has passed with the slave
market. Wages are based not upon supply and demand in labour, but
upon the cost of what seems to be a decent standard of subsistence.
This change, of course, is fundamental. It marks a new order in the
world. And the labour party of England recently adopted a program
which provides not merely for the decent living wage for workmen,
independent of the "labour market," but also provides for the
democratic control of industry: national railways, national mines,
national electricity, national housing, and national land tenure.
And as if that were not enough the demands of the labour party
include the permanent control of the prices of all the necessaries
of life, without relation to profits and independent of supply and
demand. Such things have been done during the war, and in a crisis.
Labour demands that they be done permanently. And still further to
press home its claims upon society, British labour demands a system
of taxation levied conspicuously and frankly at the rich to bring
their incomes and their holdings only to a moderate rise above the
common level--a rise in some relation to the actual differences of
mind and heart and soul and service between men, and not a difference
based on birth and inheritance and graft and grabbing. It is, of
course, revolution. But Labour now has political rights in England,
and has time and again demonstrated that it has a majority in every
part of the United Kingdom, and it is closely organized and rather
determined, and probably will have its way. In France and in Italy
where for ten years the Socialists have more or less controlled
assemblies and named cabinets, demands like those of the English
are being made.
And when the Allies win it will not be so much a change in geography
that shall mark off the world of the nineteenth century from the
world of the twentieth, as the fundamental social and economic
changes in society. The hungry guns out there at the front have
eaten away the whole social order that was!
For conditions in this war are new in the world. In every other
war, soldiers have dreamed high dreams of their rewards. But they
have not taken them--chiefly because their dreams were impractical,
somewhat because the dreams that were practical were not held by a
majority; or to some extent because if they were held by a majority
the majority had no power. Now--even Henry admitted this is no
mere theory--we have a new condition. In Europe for two decades
the labour problem has been carefully thought out. Labour is in a
numerical majority and the majority has political power and political
purpose. Labour has been asking and getting about the same things
in every country. It has been asking and getting a broader political
control in order to assume a firmer economic control. But one day
we read in the London papers of an incident that indicated how far
the state control of industry has gone in England. A strike occurred
and an important industry was threatened--not over wages, not over
hours, not over shop conditions, but over the recognition of the
union. Pig-headed managing directors stood firm against recognizing
the unions. Then the government stepped in and settled the strike
and has compelled the owners of the plant to remove the managing
director and to put in men satisfactory to the workers! Labour now
is beginning all over Europe to formulate a demand for a place in
the directorate of industries. This place in the directorate of
industries is demanded that labour may have an intelligent knowledge
of the profits of a business so that labour honestly may share those
profits with capital. That this condition is coming in Europe no
one will deny who sees the rush of events toward a redistribution
of the profits of industry.
Having the vision and having the power to get what it desires,
only the will to use the power is needed. And that will is motived
by the great shadow that is hanging over the world--the shadow of
public debt in this war. Someone must pay that debt. Heretofore
war debts have fallen heaviest upon the poor. Those least able to
pay have paid the most. But those least able to pay are coming out
of this war too smart for the old adjustment of the debt. Education,
for the past fifty years has made a new man, who will refuse to
be over-taxed. During our visit to the front the soldiers were
forever saying to Henry and me: "We have offered our lives. Those
who stayed at home must give up their riches." And as we went
about in England we were always hearing about the wisdom of a heavy
confiscatory tax. Among the conservatives themselves who presumably
have a rather large share of the national wealth, there is a
serious feeling that immediately after the war a tax-measure should
be passed which would at once confiscate a certain portion of the
property of the country--one hears different per cents discussed;
some declare that ten per cent is enough, while others hold that it
will require 25 per cent. This confiscatory tax is to be collected
when any piece of property changes hands, and the accruing sum
is to be used for paying off the national debt, or a considerable
portion of it at once. The situation is completely changed from that
which followed the Napoleonic wars, where war taxes fell largely
upon labour. So in self-preservation, capital is considering
turning over a part of its property to the state to avoid the slow
and disintegrating grind that otherwise inevitably must come.
A curious side light on the way in which democracy is conducting
this war is found in the way by which it finances the war. The great
debt of the war, piled up mountain high, is of course, converted
into bonds. These bonds, similar to our Liberty Bonds, have been
purchased not exclusively by the bankers as in former wars, but
by the people of the middle class and of the labouring class. Thus
democracy has its savings in war bonds, which would be wiped out by
an indemnity to Germany, but would be greatly inflated by an Allied
victory; and where the treasure is, there the heart is! Perhaps it
was political strategy which placed the war bonds in the hands of
the people. But more than likely it was financial necessity. For
the tremendous financial burden of this war was too great for the
investing classes to bear unaided. So even the financing of the war
has been more or less democratized. In fact, the whole conduct of
the war is democratized.
One of the corroborating proofs that this is after all not a king's
war, but a people's war, is found in the kind of stories they
were forever telling Henry and me about the war. They are not hero
stories. Mostly they are funny stories, more or less gently guying
the "pomp and circumstance of glorious war," for it is the proud
boast of the British army that this is a noncoms' war. Doubtless
the stories have small basis in fact, but the currency of these
blithe stories reflects the popular mind. Thus they say that when
General Haig and his staff came down to review the Canadian troops
and pin a carload of hardware on their men for bravery in battle,
medals of one sort and another, the Canadian General lined his
huskies up, and as the staff approached he cried anxiously, "Say,
boys--here he comes. Now see if you can't stand to attention, and
for Heaven's sake, fellows, don't call me Bill while he is here!"
And then they say that after the heavy hardware and shelf goods
were distributed a British officer lifted his voice to say: "Men,
you have written a brave page upon our history. No more splendid
courage than yours ever has been known in the annals of our proud
race. But with such magnificent courage, why can you not display
other soldierly qualities. Why are you so loose in your discipline?
Why don't you treat your officers with more respect?" And in the
pause a voice from the ranks replied, "They're not a bad lot, sir.
We like 'em all right. But we have 'em along for mascots!"
The French also seem to have their easy-going ways. For current
smoking room fiction relates that last spring after a troop of
French soldiers had been hauled out to be shot for refusing to go
into battle under orders, a whole division revolted and demanded
new officers--and got new officers--before they would move forward.
And the same smoking room fiction says that in the revolt the men
were right and the officers wrong.
"Why," asked a new English officer of some Russian troops who had
made a splendid assault on a German position in the spring of 1917,
an assault that required high courage and great soldierly skill,
"why did you men all lift up your hands just before the charge was
made?" The noncom grinned and answered, "We were taking a vote upon
the matter of the charge, sir!"
In a theater on the boulevards in Paris recently a hit was made
by introducing a stage scene showing the princes and nobility in
poverty, looking down from a gallery at the top of the theater, on
the rich working people in the boxes below; the princes and nobility
were singing a doleful ditty and dancing a sad dance about the
changed circumstances that were glooming up the world.
Simultaneously across the channel in England, they were telling this
one. Lord Milner, who in Germany would be one of the All Highest
of the High Command, was calling at an English house where the
children were not used to nobility. They heard their father refer
to Lord Milner as "my lord." And one child edged up to him in
awe and asked, "O sir, were you indeed born in a manger?" The All
Highest smiled and quoth in reply, "No, my child, no, I was not born
in a manger, but if they keep on taxing me, I fear I shall die in
one!"
The Italians have high hopes of harnessing their nine millions of
horsepower in Alpine water-falls, running their state-owned railroads
and public utilities with it, and introducing electricity as
an industrial power into Italian homes, thus bringing back to the
homes of the people the home industries like weaving which steam
took away a century ago. But this is only a dream. Yet sometimes
dreams do come true. And dreams are wishes unexpressed; and in this
clay of democratic power, a wish with a ballot behind it becomes
a will, and soon hardens into a fact. The times are changing. But
of course human nature remains much the same. Men under a given
environment will do about the same kind of things under one set of
circumstances. But we should not forget in our computations that
laws, customs, traditions, the distribution of wealth, make an
entirely new environment, and that circumstances are not the same
when environment differs. That the surroundings of those people known
collectively as "the poor" have changed, and changed permanently
by the war, no one who sees them in Europe can doubt. They are
well-fed, well-housed, and are determined to be well-educated.
They know that they can use their ballots to get their share of
the wealth they produce. They are never going to be content again
with crusts. They are motived now by hope rather than by fear, and
they are going to react strangely during the next ten years on the
social structure of this old world. But even the new majority will
not change everything of course. Grass will grow, water will run
down hill, smart men will lead fools, wise men will have the places
of honour and power, in proportion to the practicality of their
wisdom. But for all that, we shall have in a rather large and
certainly in a keenly interesting degree a new heaven and a new
earth.
Now as these speculations upon the new order came to us as our journey
drew to its close in England, the war seemed slowly to change its
meaning. It became something more than a conflict; it seemed to be
a revolution--world-wide, and all encompassing. Then we thought of
"the front" in new terms.
We realized that behind the curtain in Germany, a despotic will,
scientifically guided, is controlling the food, the munitions,
the assembling of men and materials for this war. But on this side
of the German curtain at the "front" which we knew, a democratic
purpose is doing these things. The view of that democratic purpose
at work, to me at least, was my chief trophy of the war. The laws
which make food conservation possible, which direct shipping,
mobilize railroads, control industry, regulate wages, prescribe
many of the habits of life to fit the war, all rise out of the
experience of the people. There is a vast amount of the "consent
of the governed" in this whole war game, so far as the Allies are
concerned. And as it is in democratic finance, so also is it in
the taste and talent and capacity for war. That also is democratic.
What a wide range of human activity is massed in this business of
war!
For days and days after we left the continent, in our minds we could
see armies moving into the trenches somewhere along the "far flung
battle line," and other armies moving out. The picture haunted us.
It seemed to me a cinematograph of democracy. For the change of an
army division from the trenches, tired, worn and bedraggled, moving
wearily to its station of rest, with another army division, fresh
and eager, moving up from its station of rest to the front, is indeed
a social miracle. It is a fine bit of human machinery. So in terms
of our modern democracy it may be well to review the interminable
panorama of this democratic war. Fifty years ago it would have been
a memorable achievement. Waterloo itself was not such a miracle. Yet
somewhere in this war, this wonder is done every day and no record
is made of it. Imagine hundreds of miles of wide, white roads,
hard-surfaced and graded for the war, leading to a sector of
the line. To make and keep these roads, itself is a master's job.
Imagine the roads filled all day with two long lines of trucks,
passing and repassing; one line carrying its guns and camp outfit,
its whole paraphernalia of war, going to the battle front in the
hills; another never-ceasing procession with its martial impedimenta
coming out of the hills to rest. A few horses hauling big gun
carriages straggle through the dust. Here and there, but rarely,
is a group of marching men--generally men singing as they march.
Occasionally a troop of German prisoners marching with the goose
step, comes swinging along carrying their shovels at a martial
angle--road menders--which proves that we are more than thirty
kilos from the firing line; now and then a camp-kitchen rattles
past. But ever in one's ears is the rich rumble of trucks, recalling
the voluptuous sound of the circus wagon on the village street.
But always there are two great circus parades, one going up, one
coming down. Lumbering trucks larger than city house-moving vans
whirl by in dust clouds; long--interminably long--lines of these
trucks creak, groan and rumble by. Some of the trucks are mysteriously
non-committal as to their contents--again reproducing the impression
of the circus parade. Probably they hide nothing more terrible
than tents or portable ice plants. But most of the trucks that go
growling up and come snarling down the great white roads, bear men;
singing men, sleeping men, cheering men, unshaved men, natty men,
eating men, smoking men, old men and young men, but always cheerful
men--private soldiers hurrying about the business of war; to their
trenches or from their trenches, but always cheerful. Sometimes
a staff officer's car, properly caparisoned, shuttles through the
line like a flashing needle; sometimes a car full of young officers
of the line tries to nose ahead of the men of the regiment, but
rather meekly do these youngsters try to sneak their advantage,
as one swiping an apple; no great special privilege is theirs.
Interminable lines of truck-mounted guns rattle along, each great
gun festively named, as for instance, "The Siren," or "Baby" or
"The Peach" or "The Cooing Dove." Curious snaky looking objects
all covered with wiggly camouflage--some artist's pride--are these
guns, and back of them or in front of them and around them, clank
huge empty ammunition wagons going out, or heavy ones coming in. At
short intervals along the road are repair furnaces, and near them
a truck or a gun carriage, or an ambulance that has turned out for
slight repairs. In the village are great stores of gasoline and
rubber, huge quantities of it assembled by some magic for the hour's
urgent need.
What a marvel of organization it is; no confusion, no distraught
men, no human voice raised except in ribald song. From the ends of
the earth have come all these men, all these munitions, all this
food and tents and iron and steel and rubber and gas and oil. And
there it centers for the hour of its need on this one small sector
of the front; indeed on every small sector of the long, long trail,
these impedimenta of war come hurrying to their deadly work. And
it is not one man; not one nation even, not one race, nor even one
race kindred that is assembling this endless caravan of war. It
is a spirit that is calling from the vasty deep of this world's
treasure, unto material things to rise, take shape and gather at
this tryst with death. It is the spirit of democracy calling across
the world. The supreme councils of the Allies--what are they? They
change, form and reform. Generals, field marshals, staff officers
in gold lace, cabinets, presidents, puppet kings, and God knows
what of those who strut for a little time in their pomp of place and
power--what are they but points on the drill of the great machine
whose power is the people of the world, struggling in protest
against despotism, privilege, autocracy and the pretence of the few
to play greedily at the master game. The points break off, or are
worn off--what difference does it make? Joffre, French, Cardona,
Neville, Asquith, Painleve, Kitchener, Haig--the drill never
ceases; the power behind it never falters. For once in the world
the spirit of democracy is organized; organized across lines of
race, of language, of national boundary! A score of million men, in
arms, a score of billions of people--workers, captains of industry,
local leaders, little governors and commercial princelets, bosses,
farmers, bankers, skilled labourers, and men and women of fumbling
hands and slow brains, teachers, preachers, philosophers, poets,
thieves, harlots, saints and sinners--all the free people of the
world, giving what talents Heaven has bestowed upon them to make the
power of this great machine that moves so smoothly, so resistlessly,
so beautifully along the white ribbons of roads up to the battle.
When the battle ceases, of course, that organization will depart.
But always democracy will know that it can organize, that it can
rise to a divine dignity of courage and sacrifice. And that knowledge
is the great salvage of this war. More than written laws, more
than justice established, more than wrongs righted in any nation,
and in all the nations will be the knowledge of this latent power
of men!