And what do the women say--the women who lose such men? Thus do they
decline to attend at The Hague the Peace Congress of foolish women who
have lost nobody:
"How would it be possible, in an hour like this, for us to meet women
of the enemy's countries?... Have they disavowed the ... crimes of
their government? Have they protested against the violation of
Belgium's neutrality? Against offenses to the law of nations? Against
the crimes of their army and navy? If their voices had been raised it
was too feebly for the echo of their protest to reach us across our
violated and devastated territories...."
And one celebrated lady writes to a delegate at The Hague:
"Madam, are you really English?... I confess I understand better
Englishwomen who wish to fight.... To ask Frenchwomen in such an hour
to come and talk of arbitration and mediation and discourse of an
armistice is to ask them to deny their nation.... All that Frenchwomen
could desire is to awake and acclaim in their children, their husbands
and brothers, and in their very fathers, the conviction that defensive
war is a thing so holy that all must be abandoned, forgotten,
sacrificed, and death must be faced heroically to defend and save that
which is most sacred ... our country.... It would be to deny my dead
to look for anything beside that which is and ought to be!--if the God
of right and justice, the enemy of the devil and of force and crazy
pride, is the true God."
Thus awakened and transfigured by Calamity do men and women rise in
their full spiritual nature, efface themselves, and utter sacred
words. Calamity, when the Lusitania went down, wrung from the lips of
an awakened German, Kuno Francke, this noble burst of patriotism:
_Ends Europe so? Then, in Thy mercy, God,
Out of the foundering planet's gruesome night
Pluck Thou my people's soul. From rage and craze
Of the staled Earth, O lift Thou it aloft,
Re-youthed, and through transfiguration cleansed;
So beaming shall it light the newer time,
And heavenly, on a world refreshed, unfold.
Soul of my race, thou sinkest not to dust._
If Germany's tragedy be, as I think, the deepest of all, the hope is
that she, too, will be touched by the Pentecost of Calamity, and pluck
her soul from Prussia, to whom she gave it in 1870. Thus shall the
curse be lifted.