different order but on the whole, I will admit, it is almost as bad as
the former Czarist Government it superseded. Yet let us remember certain
plain facts about it. It has remained in power to this day because it is
a Russian-speaking government standing for a whole and undivided Russia,
and the Russian people support it because it has defended Russia against
the subsidized raiders of France and Britain, against the Poles and
against the Esthonians and against the Japanese and against every sort
of outside interference with their prostrate country. They prefer
fanatics to foreigners and Bolsheviks to brigands. Frenchmen or
Americans in the same horrible position would probably make the same
choice. The Entente, the Poles, a miscellany of adventurers, have given
the Russians no breathing time to deal with their own Government in
their own fashion. And now, caught by the misadventure of an
unprecedented drought, millions of Russians in the regions disorganized
by Kolchak, Denikene and Wrangel, are starving to death—while Canada and
America have wheat and corn to burn. There is even food to spare in some
parts of Russia, but no adequate means of getting it to the starving
provinces without outside assistance. And the Western World is letting
these Russian millions starve because of the argumentative obstinacy of
the Moscow Government, which hesitated for a time to acknowledge debts
incurred by Russia—very largely for the military preparations which
saved Europe—debts it is now inconceivable that Russia can ever under
any circumstances pay, because of the pitiless resentment of the
creditors of Russia. Yet the suffering of Russia cannot help the western
money lender; they merely give him his revenge.
But even if some millions of Russian men, women and children die this
winter and are added to the count of those who have already perished
through the war—the war that saved Paris from Berlin—it does not follow
that Russia will die. Peoples are not killed in this fashion. These
distresses will not alter the fact that the Russians are the most
numerous people in Europe, and a people of unexampled gifts and
tenacity. Their magnificent resistance to outside interference since
1914 and their toleration of the Bolshevik Government when division
would have been as fatal to them as it has been in China, is a proof of
their solidarity and instinctive political wisdom. There are as many
Russians as there are people in the United States of America, and they
occupy an area as great and far richer in undeveloped resources. In
spite of the monstrous Czarist Government which treated elementary
education as an offense against the State, the prose literature, the
drama, the music, the pictorial art—even the science of the Russians
during the last hundred years—all this compares favorably with that of
the United States. These Russians are indeed one of the very greatest of
people and they have survived tragic experiences that might well have
destroyed any other race. And Washington, I gather, proposes to settle
the peace of Europe, Asia and the Pacific without them.
There is, I know, a very strong case to excuse Washington from sending
an invitation to the existing Russian Government. I would be the last
person in the world to minimize the difficulties the Bolshevik
Government puts in the way of any fair dealings with the western powers;
it is bound by its Communist theory not to recognize them fairly and to
make gestures of preparation for their overthrow. In addition to its
general theoretical obduracy Moscow is also afflicted with a
particularly obdurate, pedantic, argumentative and disastrous Foreign
Minister, Chicherin. But practical necessity knows no theories and the
Bolshevik Government, if only it can save its face, is now
extraordinarily anxious for recognition from and dealings with the
western Governments.
I do not see why the western Governments, having regard to the needs of
Russia, should try to outdo the Bolsheviks in obstinacy, pedantry and
cruelty, nor why they should not make an honest attempt to get along
with the de facto government until it develops naturally into something
else. For such a development only a rough working peace is wanted. Given
that, and a release from impossible debts, Russia, relieved forever from
the black curse of Czarism, will go right on to become a land of
restored cultivation, of resuscitated mines and presently of reawakening
towns, a democratic land of common people more like the free, poor,
farming, prospecting and developing United States of 1840 than anything
else in history.
So long as Russia suffers the Bolshevik Government I think Washington
ought to suffer it, but perhaps in that opinion I go beyond the
possibilities of the case. Then I suggest that at least Washington ought
to set up some well-informed lawyer, some bureau, to play the part of
the Russian advocate at the conference. If Russia is not to be allowed a
vote in the decision of things, let her at least be heard.
Consider what the future must hold for this great people, and mark the
amazing folly of the insults and evils we heap upon their land. Look it
up in an atlas or encyclopaedia. Measure what it is we ignore. In a
score of years Russia may be a renascent land as vigorous as the United
States in 1840. In a century she may be as great and powerful and
civilized as any state on earth. For such powers as France and Britain
and Japan to sit in council upon the fate of the world without her is as
if, in the dark years of 1863 and 1864, they had sat in council upon the
future of America without the United States. Indeed, something of the
sort did happen in those dark years; France, I recall, sent troops and
munitions into Mexico, as recently she has sent them into Poland and
South Russia. And somewhere in the world there is a grave, the grave of
a “white hope,” a reactionary puppet who was to have restored Mexico to
the European system—the friend of the Emperor Napoleon the Third, the
Emperor Maximilian.
When I was a small boy learning the rudiments of geography, the earth
was presented to me in two hemispheres, the Old World and the new. Not
once or twice only has America vindicated her right to that title. Will
Washington confirm that great tradition and open a way of escape now
from the tangled narrowness of Versailles? Are Germany and Russia to
perish amid the incurable quarrels of the Old World or find their
salvation in the New?
IV
THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR
Washington, Nov. 11.
Britain, France, Italy and now the people of the United States, have
honored and buried the bodies of certain Unknown Soldiers, each
according to their national traditions and circumstances. Canada, I
hear, is to follow suit.
So the world expresses its sense that in the great war the only hero was
the common man. Poor Hans and poor Ivan lie rotting yet under the soil
of a hundred battlefields, bones and decay, rags of soiled uniform and
fragments of accoutrements, still waiting for monuments and speeches.
Yet they too were mothers’ sons, kept step, obeyed orders, went singing
into battle, and knew the strange intoxication of soldierly fellowship
and the sense of devotion to something much greater than themselves.
In Arlington Cemetery soldiers of the Confederate South lie honored
equally with the Federal dead, the right or wrong of their cause
altogether forgotten and only their sacrifice remembered. A time will
come when we shall cease to visit the crimes and blunders and
misfortunes of their Governments upon the common soldiers and poor folk
of Germany and Russia, when our bitterness will die out and we shall
mourn them as we mourn our own, as souls who gave their lives and
suffered greatly in one universal misfortune.
A time will come when these vast personifications of conflict, the
Unknown British Soldier, the Unknown American Soldier, the Unknown
French Soldier, etc., will merge into the thought of a still greater
personality, the embodiment of 20,000,000 separate bodies and of many
million broken lives, the Unknown Soldier of the great war.
It would be possible, I suppose, to work out many things concerning him.
We could probably find out his age and his height and his weight and
such like particulars very nearly. We could average figures and
estimates that would fix such matters within a very narrow range of
uncertainty. In race and complexion, I suppose he would be mainly North
European; North Russian, German, Frankish, North Italian, British and
American elements would all have the same trend toward a tallish,
fairish, possibly blue-eyed type; but also there would be a strong
Mediterranean streak in him, Indian and Turkish elements, a fraction of
Mongolian and an infusion of African blood—brought in not only through
the American colored troops but by the free use by the French of their
Senegalese.
None of these factors would be strong enough to prevent his being mainly
Northern and much the same mixture altogether as the American citizen of
1950 is likely to be. He would be a white man with a touch of Asia and a
touch of color. And he would be young—I should guess about twenty-one or
twenty-two—still boyish, probably unmarried rather than married, with a
father and mother alive and with the memories and imaginations of the
home he was born in still fresh and vivid in his mind when he died. We
could even, I suppose, figure in general terms how he died. He was
struck in daylight amid the strange noises and confusion of a modern
battlefield by something out of the unknown—bullet, shell fragment or
the like. At the moment he had been just a little scared—every one is a
little scared on a battlefield—but much more excited than scared and
trying hard to remember his training and do his job properly. When he
was hit he was not so much hurt at first as astonished. I should guess
that the first sensation of a man hard hit on a battlefield is not so
much pain as an immense chagrin.
I suppose it would be possible to go on and work out how long it was
before he died after he was hit, how long he suffered and wondered, how
long he lay before his ghost fell in with that immense still muster in
the shades, those millions of his kind who had no longer country to
serve nor years of life before them, who had been cut off as he had been
cut off suddenly from sights and sounds and hopes and passions. But
rather let us think of the motives and feelings that had brought him, in
so gallant and cheerful a frame of mind, to this complete sacrifice.
What did the Unknown Soldier of the great war think he was doing when he
died? What did we, we people who got him into the great war and who are
still in possession of this world of his, what did we persuade him to
think he was doing and what is the obligation we have incurred to him to
atone for his death, for the life and sunlight he will know no more?
He was still too young a man to have his motives very clear. To conceive
what moved him and what he desired is a difficult and disputable task.
M. George Nobelmaire at a recent meeting of the League of Nations
Assembly declared that he had heard French lads whisper “Vive la
France!” and die. He suggested that German boys may have died saying,
“Colonel, say to my mother, ‘Vive l’Allemagne!’” Possibly. But the
French are trained harder in patriotism than any other people. I doubt
if it was the common mood. It was certainly not the common mood among
the British.
I cannot imagine many English boys using their last breath to say “Rule
Britannia!” or “King George for Merry England!” Some of our young men
swore out of vexation and fretted; some, and it was not always the
youngest, became childish again and cried touchingly for their mothers;
many maintained the ironical flippancy of our people to the end; many
died in the vein of a young miner from Durham with whom I talked one
morning in the trenches near Martinpuich, trenches which had been badly
“strafed” overnight. War, he said, was a beastly job, “but we’ve got to
clean this up.” That is the spirit of the lifeboat man or fireman. That
is the great spirit. I believe that was far nearer to the true mind of
the Unknown Soldier than any tinpot Viva-ing of any flag, nation or
empire whatever.
I believe that when we generalize the motives that took the youth who
died in the great war out of the light of life and took them out at
precisely the age when life is most desirable, we shall find that the
dominating purpose was certainly no narrow devotion to the “glory” or
“expansion” of any particular country, but a wide-spirited hostility to
wrong and oppression. That is clearly shown by the nature of the appeals
that were made in every country to sustain the spirit of its soldiers.
If national glory and patriotism had been the ruling motive of these
young men, then manifestly their propaganda would have concerned
themselves mainly with national honor and flag idolatry. But they did
not do so. Nowadays flags fly better on parades and stoop fronts than on
battlefields. The war propagandas dwelt steadily and insistently upon
the wickedness and unrighteousness of the enemy, upon the dangers of
being overwhelmed by foreign tyranny, and particularly upon the fact
that the enemy had planned and made the war. These boys fought best on
that—everywhere.
So far as the common men in every belligerent country went, therefore,
the great war was a war against wrong, against force, against war
itself. Whatever it was in the thoughts of the diplomatists, it was that
in the minds of the boys who died. In the minds of these young and
generous millions who are personified in the Unknown Soldier of the
great war, in the minds of the Germans and Russians who fought so
stoutly, quite as much as the Americans, British, French or Italians,
the war was a war to end war.
And that marks our obligation.
Every speech that is made beside the graves of these Unknown Soldiers
who lie now in the comradeship of youthful death, every speech which
exalts patriotism above peace, which hints at reparations and revenges,
which cries for mean alliances to sustain the traditions of the
conflict, which exalts national security over the common welfare, which
wags the “glorious flag” of this nation or that in the face of the
universal courage and tragedy of mankind, is an insult and an outrage
upon the dead youth who lies below. He sought justice and law in the
world as he conceived these things, and whoever approaches his resting
place unprepared to serve the establishment of a world law and world
justice, breathing the vulgar cants and catchwords of a patriotism
outworn and of conflicts that he died to end, commits a monstrous
sacrilege and sins against all mankind.
V
THE PRESIDENT AT ARLINGTON
Washington, Nov. 11.
I am writing this just after my return from the funeral, in the National
Cemetery, of the American Unknown Soldier at Arlington, a very stately
and moving ceremony, under the bright blue sky and the cold, keen air of
a Virginia November day. The body had been lying in state at the Capitol
and it was carried through Washington to the cemetery at the head of a
great procession in which the Supreme Court, the Cabinet, Senators,
members of the House of Representatives, war veterans and a multitude of
societies marched on foot, a march of nearly two hours and a half
duration. Much of this gathering was of the substance of all such
processions, but one or two of the contingents were rich with
association and suggestion.
There were fifty or sixty, I should guess, very old men, bent,
white-headed—one with a conspicuous long, white beard—veterans of a
civil war that was fought out to an end before I was born. They came
close to a contingent of men who had been specially decorated in the
great war, erect and eager, still on the better side of the prime of
life. These older men had fought in a great fight against a division, a
separation that today, thanks to their sacrifice, has become
inconceivable. They had fought to seal the Federal Union of what were
else warring States. The young men who marched before them had fought in
a war upon the greater stage of the whole world. Some day the tale of
those abundant heroes will have shrunken to the dimensions of that
little band of pathetic and glorious old men. Will they live to as
complete an assurance that their cause also has been won forever, the
newer veterans of the greater union that has yet to come?
There were many points of contrast between the ceremony I have just
witnessed in the graceful marble amphitheatre in the beautiful Virginian
open country and the burials that have taken place in the very hearts of
London, Paris and Rome. In the face of a common identity of idea, they
mark an essential difference in the nature of the occasion.
Thursday I went to see the people who were filing past the flag-covered
coffin. It was a crowd fairly representative, I thought, of the
Washington population as one sees it on the streets; all classes were
represented, but chiefly it consisted of that well-dressed, healthy
looking middle class sort of people who predominate in the streets of
most American cities. They came to honor a national hero, the
personification of American courage and loyalty. Few, I think, were
actual mourners of a dead soldier. The couples and groups of people I
saw hurrying up the sloping paths to the entrance of the Capitol, filing
up the steps to the rotunda or dispersing on the other side were
characterized by a sort of bright eagerness and approval.
They contrasted very strongly with my memory of the great column of
still and mournful people under the dark London sky, eight deep,
stretching all up Whitehall and down Northumberland Avenue and along the
Embankment for a great distance, a column which moved on slowly, step by
step, and which faded away at night to be replaced by fresh mourners on
the morrow to do honor to the Unknown Warrior in London. That crowd,
with its wreaths and flowers, represented the families, the lovers, the
sisters and friends of perhaps a quarter of a million of dead men from
London and the south and centre of England; the massed, mute tragedy of
its loss was overwhelming. It reduced all the ceremony that had gathered
it to comparative unimportance. But the remote distances of America
forbade any such concentration of sorrow. There may have been the
relations and friends of perhaps a thousand men upon the scene at
Arlington. The loss to the District of Columbia itself was less than six
hundred killed. A group of wounded men in the amphitheatre struck the
most intimate note. The rest of the gathering at Arlington shared a less
personal grief. They were sympathizers rather than sufferers.
Because of this emotional difference, the Arlington ceremony presented
itself primarily as a ceremony. For most there it was a holiday, a fine
and noble holiday, but a holiday. By it, America did not so much mourn
the tragedy of war as seek to arouse itself to that tragedy. Everywhere
the Stars and Stripes, the most decorative and exhilarating of national
flags, waved and fluttered, and an irresistible expression of America’s
private life and buoyant well-being mingled in the proceedings. For most
of the gathering that coffin under the great flag held nothing they had
ever touched personally; it was not America’s lost treasure of youth,
but rather a warning of the fate that may yet overtake the youth of
America if war is not to end. At Arlington, throughout the length and
breadth of America, when for two minutes at mid-day all work and
movement stopped and America stood still, an innumerable host of fathers
and mothers and wives and friends could whisper thanks to God in their
hearts that their sons and their beloved remained alive.
And I suppose it is largely because America is still so much less
war-stricken than any of the other belligerents of the great war that so
much more powerful a sense of will was apparent in all these
proceedings. The burial of the Unknown Soldier in America was not a
thing in itself as it was in London, in Paris or Rome; it was a solemn
prelude to action, the action of the great conference which is to seek
peace and enduring peace for all mankind. This note was struck even in
the Chaplain’s opening invocation. He said:
“Facing the events of the morrow, when from the workbench of the world
there will be taken an unusual task, we ask that Thou wilt accord
exceptional judgment, foresight and tactfulness of approach to those who
seek to bring about a better understanding among men and nations to the
end that discord, which provokes war, may disappear and that there may
be world tranquillity.”
And the very fine oration of President Harding, following closely upon
this line.
I saw the President for the first time at Arlington. He is a very big,
fine-looking man and his voice is a wonderful instrument. He spoke
slowly and very distinctly, his gestures admirably controlled. He is—how
can I say it?—more statuesque than any of the American Presidents of
recent times, but without a trace in his movements or appearance of
posturing or vanity. Men say he is a sincerely modest man, determined to
do the best that is in him and at once appalled and inspired by the
world situation in which he finds himself among the most prominent
figures. Not only in its main circumstances but in many of its incidents
is the position of the President of the United States appalling. The
President stood in the apse to the right of the Unknown Soldier and to
the other side of him was a black box upon a stand, a box perhaps two
feet by one. This was the receiver that was to carry his voice,
intensely amplified, to still greater gatherings in New York, in San
Francisco and over the whole United States. Never was human utterance so
magnified. Every syllable, every slip was recorded. He slipped once at
an antithesis and was obliged to repeat. From the Atlantic to the
Pacific that slip was noted.
I have heard much detraction of the President both before I came to
America and since I have been here, but here I have found also a growing
and spreading belief in him. And this address of his, rhetorical though
it was in a simple and popular American way, was nevertheless a very
dignified address and one inspired by a spirit that is undeniably great.
Here is a fine saying:
“His patriotism was none less if he craved more than triumph of country;
rather, it was greater if he hoped for a victory for all human kind.
Indeed, I revere that citizen whose confidence in the righteousness of
his country inspired belief that its triumph is the victory of humanity.
“This American soldier went forth to battle with no hatred for any
people in the world, but hating war and hating the purpose of every war
for conquest.”
We are to seek “the rule under which reason and righteousness shall
prevail.” There is to be “the commanding voice of a conscious
civilization against armed warfare,” “a new and lasting era of peace on
earth.” And with a fine instinct for effect the President ended his
oration with the Lord’s Prayer, with its appeal for one universal law
for mankind: “Thy kingdom come on earth....”
Every other gossip tells you that President Harding comes from Main
Street and repeats the story of Mrs. Harding saying: “We’re just folk.”
If President Harding is a fair sample of Main Street, Sinclair Lewis has
not told us the full story and Main Street is destined to save the
world.
VI
THE FIRST MEETING
Washington, Nov. 13.
It was difficult at first to imagine the conference as anything more
than an admirably well managed social occasion.
Continental Hall is a quite charming building, not too big for intimacy,
not too small for a sufficient gathering of people. The chief members of
the delegations had still to assemble; they were to sit at green baize
covered tables in the body of the hall. About this central arena sat the
massed attaches, and under the galleries the press representatives. In
the boxes clustered the ladies of the diplomatic world. Members of the
House of Representatives, the Senators, their friends and a sprinkling
of privileged people occupied the big galleries above.
There was a great chatter of conversation when I entered. Everybody was
greeting friends, flitting from group to group. It was one of those
gatherings where everybody seemed to know everybody. Socially, it was
extraordinarily like a very smart first night in a prominent London
theatre.
“Last time I came to America,” I found myself saying, “I brought a silk
hat and morning coat, and never wore them once. Now everybody seems to
be wearing a morning coat and a silk hat.” It was the sort of occasion
one dresses for. And that was the tone of the conversation.
It was difficult to believe that this gathering could be the beginning
of anything of supreme historical importance.
Came a slight hush in the conversation. The delegates appeared, all with
tremendously familiar faces taken out of the illustrated papers. They
disposed themselves in their seats in leisurely fashion. One seat
remained vacant for a time—the seat of the President. Then appeared
President Harding, and there was a great clapping of hands. It became
more and more like a first night. Then a hushing of enthusiasm, and
silence, and he spoke.