THUNDERY WEATHER
Two months later the _rapprochement_ of Russia and Japan was a _fait
accompli_; and at the same time a new 18,000,000 Chinese loan was on
the counters of the Deutsche-Asiatische Bank.
At this thing England, as it were, started! The Banque de l’Indo-Chine
had some under-part in the handling of the loan—but no British, no
American, syndicate. And immediately a feeling of unease ran through
our land.
It was as when wild-fowl in flight foreknow tempests from the puffy
fuffs and the scent of thunder, and ten thousand outcries of fright are
drowned within the row of rising winds.
Queer things seemed at work in the world, purposes, symptoms, like
thieves’ feet creaking in corridors at midnight, causing one to finger
one’s trigger. But as to their meaning, the scheme had been too subtly
plotted for any mind to construct the pieces in the right sequence.
The Prince of Wales wrote to the Queen from Queensferry: “Things seem
singular to me, though I don’t quite see what’s what. Why should the
Mikado wish to rush like this into Russia’s arms?”
It was on the morning of the 11th of October that a Peking telegram
of Reuter’s Special Service asserted that Germany had been offered
the lease of the Shantung Peninsula as guarantee, on similar terms as
Kiao-Chow, Port Arthur, Wei-hai-Wei, and Mirs Bay.
“Never,” said Manchester and the City.
“But yes,” said Potsdam through the _Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung_.
So it was true? In an apparently inspired article _The Times_ declared
that if China was going to be partitioned in this fashion, then the
Yangtse Valley was due to England. Upon which Russia, France, clapped
hand to dirk against Germany, against England, against vague Fate.
The heads of men commenced to dizzy in the chaos and uncertainty of
contradictory interests, the whirl of forces working of themselves.
A Polar Ocean was breaking up: but as to how the masses might range
themselves in the crash the Creator alone knew.
The world had as yet no Government. Each nation had: but the planet was
an Anarchy, a rabble of nations without arrangement or police, where
each might murder, cheat, or steal at its own sweet will.
For fifty years Germany had conceived the idea that she needed
“colonies”: she did not need any “_colonies_”: but the fact that
she passionately imagined that she did was an urgent fact which a
world-Government would have looked to.
Everywhere in her frenzy for “_colonies_” she had been blocked. Did she
look toward Brazil?—there was the Monroe Doctrine. Did she dream of
cotton-fields waving over Asia Minor?—eight million Magyars, chattering
an Asiatic language, ranged themselves against her peaceful penetration
of the Near East.
When she aimed at the Germanisation of Trieste and Fiume as “outlets,”
a handful of Croatian Slavs under Hungarian and Italian influence
waxed angry. When she wished to win the goodwill of Galicia and the
Austrian Poles by soft-soaping the Poles of Posen, Petersburg impeded
the eastward eagle of Teutonic ideas and capital by going one better in
benevolence to her own Poles.
Her “Drang Nach Osten” toward Constantinople, Syria, Mesopotamia was
blocked by the Balkan States. Her vision of an Austro-German Empire
washed by the North-Sea was a vision still—the “Balance of Power”
blocked her.
What, then, was the good of that mass of army toeing the globe with
challenging eye, chin up, of that weight of navy big with child, whose
expense kept the spectre of bankruptcy ever at her elbow?
Whether her own fault or Fate’s, it could not last! She was poor for
nothing! Her red-hot energies raged like men fighting in a fire in
a nightmare,—and for nothing! she was bewitched, she was stung with
the tarantula, she danced frantically, and no locomotion, she swelled
monstrously, and not with porridge, but with dropsy.
It could not last—she was too ’cute, and not wise enough, too strong,
and not great enough.
In these very days of the Russo-Japanese _rapprochement_, of the loan,
and of the question of Shantung, hot rancour was in her heart at the
withdrawals of capital by Paris and London, large selling orders, and
drop in securities. She was poor still!
But Shantung seemed luscious to her—a piece of luck to be seized; and
the Kaiser made a dinner-speech. He was a neurotic character, who
ranted, and had Anglophobia—and the Heir-Apparent still more! though
our Queen had fixed upon his sister, the Princess Elizabeth, to be
the wife of our “Teddy.” He was said to have some ability—was then a
ship’s-commodore.
The German High Seas Fleet was thereupon recalled from Autumn Manœuvres
on the Norway coast; our First and Fourth Destroyer Flotillas were
operating with specific orders about the Orkneys and North Sea;
submarines were on the watch at Lamlash; the First and Second Battle
and Cruiser Squadrons were mobilised about Queensferry and Cromarty.
There was a rumour that they were being cleared for action. Twice in
five days there were meetings of the Cabinet. Bread had gone up a penny
a quartern.
The French First Line of Defence was mobilising in Toulon Harbour;
three brigades of Zouaves from North Africa had landed at Marseilles.
In the midst of which world-turmoil, how perplexing the news, flashed
by a New York Herald correspondent, that the new Kotohito Ministry had
promised the Diet enormous economies in the Naval Estimates—a drop of
two hundred and fifty million yen (25,000,000 sterling)!
The Chancellor’s speech had dwelt upon the cordial relations of
Japan with all nations, upon her poverty, upon the immorality of the
monstrous armaments of modern man...!
Did Japan, then, no longer need a navy? Was the outlandish yellow ally
of England failing her in the hour of need?
Wire on wire! like lightnings winking here, there, here, when the
weather is weird, and peewits wheel and wail....
But on the afternoon of the 22nd the Under-Secretary, Sir B. S.
Gilbert, stated in the Commons that the situation was still not beyond
the skill of diplomats; for if Germany would but leave unfettered the
land-taxes and Custom-dues of Shantung, which furnished part of the
source of repayment of the last British loan, a _modus vivendi_ might
yet be discovered. And that night London went to bed with a quieter
mind. Many gales had gathered, and had passed again.
But three terrible days of strain followed, in which Whitehall waited
for a reply from Wilhelm-Strasse, and none arrived....
And on the fourth day an intense interest took hold upon Englishmen at
the rumour of a most singular meeting—at Königsberg—between the Tsar,
the Kaiser, their two Foreign Ministers, and Mons. Cambertin of the
Quai d’Orsay.
When England gathered that France was there in the conference, she
said: “And you, too...?”
The old “Entente Cordiale” was a phrase of the earlier years of the
century; but its spirit, one hoped, lived. France stood for Light,
England for Good-will: if they two fought, then the Kingdom of God was
divided against itself.
And, if they fought—with Morocco now “a second France”—Gibraltar was
useless, Suez blocked, Malta gone—especially if Spain was with the
Continentals. For, with Tarifa fortified on one side of the Straits,
and on the other Tangier, the heights of Gibel Musa, and the low-lying
dunes by Ceuta bristling with batteries, then the Mediterranean Fleet
was in prison.
How would France go, if it was war, in truth, at last? That was the
question now. Would her larger light fail her, her world-instinct, and
temptation prevail with her? Rumours, rumours, flew from agitated lip
to agitated lip. _The Daily Mail_ had information that Germany, in her
urgency to attract the alliance of France, was lavishing the wildest
offers—Alsace-Lorraine! a whole North-African Empire! _The Telegraph_
gave it that the Persian Gulf, India, Manchuria, Mongolia were to go
to Russia. It was reported that crowds were daily ranging about Berlin
singing old Schneckenburger’s _Wacht am Rhein_; that in the _bureaux_
of the British Ambassadors at Berlin, at Petersburg, were already
declarations of war.
And if Russia was going, must not France, too, go with the powers of
darkness? The Franco-Russian Alliance, indeed, had lapsed; but its
habit and leaning persisted. In which case, England stood alone to sink
or swim with America? who might have enough to handle west and south?
For all saw that, if it was war at last, then it was war world-wide and
final, to terminate in a new earth, and a new look of the skies.